Reflecting gendered experiences of student-staff partnership: a student standpoint using poetic transcription

Abstract

Debates in higher education problematise the role of students in student engagement.Resisting neoliberal values and language, scholars argue that students should be positioned as 'partners' or 'change agents' rather than 'customers' or 'consumers,' but the extent to which students are able to self-author their experiences as subjects rather than objects in mainstream publications is rare. Drawing on standpoint theory, we-three students from international contexts-argue that if students are to shape higher education discourses, then students' work needs to be more prominently represented in mainstream academic publishing. We exemplify one approach to alternate forms of conducting and sharing student-led research by exploring and representing our own experiences of gender in partnership through poetic transcription.In doing so, we hope to disrupt some of the dominant assumptions around the positioning of students as objects in research and the validity of students' self-authored voices in higher education.

The paradigm wars rage: the need for an integrated approach for the future of higher education

“…Where I've experienced firsthand the weight of responsibility when students choose to share their voices and experiences with us. Because as many have written, students as partners repositions students from being the objects in the classroom or the objects of our research, to being our colleagues and peers, whose expertise in their lived experiences can help us create socially-just learning experiences and more accurate inferences from the data we collect (Broughan & Prinsloo, 2020;Mercer-Mapstone et al, 2019).…”