The benefits of student-staff partnerships are widely reported in the Students-as-Partners literature. It is envisaged that partnership initiatives can have a transformative effect on institutional cultures, however, how this transformation might be achieved is less clear. Building on transdisciplinary and systems change perspectives, we propose a Partnership Outcome Spaces framework to develop understanding of how student-staff partnerships might influence institutional cultures. We identify four outcome spaces: situation, knowledge, learning and relationships, with reflexivity and a structured partnership methodology as key enablers of these outcomes. This framework is applied to a case study examining a Student Services Hub project in one Australian university. Through this analysis, the importance of less-tangible and relational outcomes arising from student-staff partnerships is highlighted. To influence institutional culture change, we encourage student-staff partnership practitioners to purposefully negotiate the various possible outcomes of their initiatives as an integral part of the partnership process.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted higher education globally. Teaching staff have pivoted to online learning and employed a range of strategies to facilitate student success. Aside from offering a testing ground for innovative teaching strategies, the pandemic has also provided an opportunity to better understand the pre-existing conditions that enable higher education systems to be resilient - that is, to respond and adapt to disturbances in ways that retain the functions and structures essential for student success.
This article presents a case study covering two transdisciplinary undergraduate courses at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. The results highlight the importance of information flows, feedbacks, self-organisation, leadership, openness, trust, equity, diversity, reserves, social learning and nestedness. These results show that resilience frameworks developed by previous scholars are relevant to university teaching systems and offer guidance on which system features require protection and strengthening to enable effective responses to future disturbances.
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