Catherine Bovill & Peter Felten 
Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching 
A Guide for Faculty

A guide to developing productive student-faculty partnerships in higher education

Student-faculty partnerships is an innovation that is gaining traction on campuses across the country. There are few established models in this new endeavor, however. Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching: A Guide for Faculty offers administrators, faculty, and students both the theoretical grounding and practical guidelines needed to develop student-faculty partnerships that affirm and improve teaching and learning in higher education.

* Provides theory and evidence to support new efforts in student-faculty partnerships

* Describes various models for creating and supporting such partnerships

* Helps faculty overcome some of the perceived barriers to student-faculty partnerships

* Suggests a range of possible levels of partnership that might be appropriate in different circumstances

* Includes helpful responses to a range of questions as well as advice from faculty, students, and administrators who have hands-on experience with partnership programs

Balancing theory, step-by-step guidelines, expert advice, and practitioner experience, this book is a comprehensive why- and how-to handbook for developing a successful student-faculty partnership program.

Table of Content

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xxv

About the Authors xxvii

1. What Are Student-Faculty Partnerships? Our Guiding Principles and Definition 1

2. Preliminary Questions about Student-Faculty Partnerships 15

3. Partnerships with Students Examples from Individual Faculty 27

4. Program-Level Approaches to Student-Faculty Partnerships 59

5. Outcomes of Student-Faculty Partnerships Support from Research Literature and Outcomes for Faculty and Students 97

6. The Challenges of Student-Faculty Partnerships 133

7. Practical Strategies for Developing Student-Faculty Partnerships 143

8. Further Questions about Student-Faculty Partnerships 171

9. Assessing Processes and Outcomes of Student-Faculty Partnerships 187

10. Next Steps . . . Toward a Partnership Movement? 203

Appendix I: The Ladder of Active Student Participation in Curriculum Design 213

Appendix II: Guidelines for the Students as Learners and Teachers (Sa LT) Program at Bryn Mawr College (Modified for This Volume) 217

Appendix III: Practical Strategies for Developing Student-led Research Projects From the Students as Change Agents Program, University of Exeter, United Kingdom 229

References 231

Index 257

About the author

ALISON COOK-SATHER is the Mary Katherine Woodworth Professor of Education and coordinator of the Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr College. She publishes and presents widely on student voice and student-teacher partnerships.

CATHERINE BOVILL is a senior lecturer in the Academic Development Unit at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Her research and publications focus on students and staff cocreating curricula.

PETER FELTEN is executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning and assistant provost at Elon University. His other books include Transformative Conversations: A Guide to Mentoring Communities Among Colleagues in Higher Education (Jossey-Bass, 2013).