Can Student Partnership Working Ever Be More Than a Minority Sport? (original) (raw)

2024, The 10th annual Students as Partners Roundtable

According to the 2024 BlackBullion survey (Censuswide, 2024), 46% of UK students self-define as ‘commuter students’. The term is contested, either describing the distance or time taken for a student to travel from their accommodation to their institution or students who remain at their pre-higher education home address throughout. Whichever definition is used, commuting pressurizes students’ resources, potentially limiting the development of the social and cultural capital(s) that enable success. Furthermore, the 2023 Student Academic Experience Survey (Neves and Stephenson, 2024) states that almost 55% of university student respondents work part-time and a significant number balance studying with caring responsibilities. Additionally, students are experiencing a substantial rise in physical and mental health issues alongside cost-of-living difficulties. It is anticipated that many higher education students are likely to be overwhelmed and stressed about meeting academic deadlines while managing work shifts or family care. In April 2024, AdvanceHE launched a new ’Student Engagement through Partnership’ framework (Hack, 2024) promoting ‘a commitment to open, constructive and continuous dialogue’ when considering effective approaches to learning, teaching and assessment. This can be seen as a way to develop academic citizenship, but also potentially positions student-staff partnerships as something that students ‘do’ (Mathews in Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017) to meet neo-liberal performativity agendas, rather than as a democratic enactment of values-informed theory (Peters and Mathias, 2018) or recognition of the ‘intra-active’ and transdisciplinary nature of all in ‘entanglement’ (Barad, 2007). Over 90% of Birmingham Newman students commute to campus, with significant numbers working whilst studying and/or have caring responsibilities. Yet close to 150 staff student partnership projects have been completed in ten years, enabling many individual stories of personal transformation. Despite this, the projects remain a ‘minority sport’: How can the transformative potential of partnerships be experienced in times of such significant barriers to engagement?