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Vol. 18 No. 7 (2021)

Published: 3 September 2021

Articles

  • Editorial: Collaboration in higher education: Partnering with students, colleagues and external stakeholders

    Sandra Abegglen, Tom Burns, Sandra Sinfield

    Welcome to this Special Issue of the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice (JUTLP). This editorial provides an overview of Collaboration in Higher Education. Humans are social, inter-dependent beings, needing to be and communicate with each other. Being with other people provides an opportunity to grow and develop, creating a sense of self and identity. Together we construct, structure and restructure the stories that build the larger narratives of who we are, what we do and how we live, act and behave as people, professionals and larger communities. It is through our collaborations that we come together, and construct meaning and ourselves. As Higher Education continues to exclude and sideline, as it constrains and removes spaces and places for collaboration between service staff, faculty and students within institutions, between institutions, and with other stakeholders, there is a need to rediscover the power of collaboration. The articles included, build on practical experience, research data, personal and collective reflections, to outline how the contributors have navigated this tension to create spaces of voice and hope. Presented are case studies that are boundary crossing: across disciplinary boundaries; cross-institution collaboration; cross-boundary working; pedagogical co-creation and the re-conceptualising of learning; and students as partners, co-researchers and co-authors. Together they showcase refreshed notions of collegiality and collaboration in Higher Education that support new and more nuanced, and dynamic models of co-creation. We hope the Special Issue helps seed an ecology of collaborative practice for social justice – a more humane academia.

    Read article: Editorial: Collaboration in higher education: Partnering with students, colleagues and external stakeholders

  • “To be relied upon and trusted”: The centrality of personal relationships to collaboration in HE, in a successful cross-team institutional change project

    Karen Heard-Lauréote, Carina Buckley

    The change to online delivery in March 2020 provided an opportunity as well as a requirement to change the way we work in Higher Education (HE), from a traditional stance focussed on hierarchy and roles to one that embraced individual core skills and competencies. The Transformation Academy (TA), Solent University's response led by the Solent Learning and Teaching Institute (SLTI), had as its goal the preparation of 1100 modules for online delivery in September 2020, delivered via institutional cross-team collaboration to ensure success within a narrow timescale. Collaboration is by necessity situated and dialogic, and most effectively driven by an affective and trust-based connection between collaborative partners as well as to the project goal. In bringing together previously disparate and siloed teams, the TA project’s success relied upon new collaborative partners quickly forming those connections, despite the prevailing neoliberal emphasis in UK HE on performativity and pressure from senior management to complete the work within 12 weeks. Adopting a qualitative empirical research design and single, local, exploratory case study approach, data is derived from 11 semi-structured interviews with project members who collaborated with colleagues outside of their usual team structures, to explore the personal value they perceived obtaining from the TA project. Preliminary findings suggest that Learning and Teaching (L&T) collaborations in a pressured environment benefit from authenticity in emotion and interpersonal affective connections, which in turn are engendered by openness and clarity in communication, a flattened hierarchy, and a sense of ownership for all participants.

    Read article: “To be relied upon and trusted”: The centrality of personal relationships to collaboration in HE, in a successful cross-team institutional change project

  • Inclusive, multi-partner co-creation for the teaching of special educational needs and disabilities in higher education

    Emma Wright, Rosi Smith, Melissa Vernon, Robyn Wall, Lucinda White

    Co-creation of curriculum content is a growing priority across Higher Education and, while many projects stress the market benefits to institutions and students, this research instead focussed on promoting inclusion, social justice and anti-oppressive practice, with theoretical underpinnings in the social model of disability. This joint research project between staff and students at De Montfort University (DMU), Leicester, led to the co-creation of a Level 6 SEND module on the BA Education Studies programme. The co-designed research explores how the experiences of neurodivergent people, those with SEND, their families and practitioners, can inform teaching practices and module specifications at undergraduate level in Education Studies. Qualitative data, collected via questionnaires, focus groups and interviews with students, parents, practitioners and academics, revealed rich, diverse perspectives on the knowledge and understanding that future educators need, as well as the most inclusive methods for teaching and assessing that knowledge. The practice-based implications of the research included co-creation of a Level 6 SEND module which recognises value in ‘non-professional’ voices and embeds anti-oppressive practice in its design, delivery and assessment.

    Read article: Inclusive, multi-partner co-creation for the teaching of special educational needs and disabilities in higher education

  • Characterising collaboration: Reflecting on a partnership between academic support staff and lecturers to help university students learn how to write for the discipline of chemistry

    Fezokuhle Mfundo Makhanya, Lindelani Qwabe, Katie Bryant

    Academic staff often lament their students’ abilities to write for academic purposes. To address these writing challenges, faculty members can seek support from their university writing centres. Despite the expertise that can be found in areas of writing pedagogy in this location, these partnerships can often be asymmetrical with the academic staff members’ ways of knowing overpowering those belonging to members of the writing centre. Perhaps these issues of inequity and disregard between disciplines are one reason at least half the collaborations that form in universities context fizzle rather than flourish. This article reports on findings from a reflective investigation done by three members of a collaboration that is currently flourishing in its efforts to help first and final year chemistry students learn how to write for academic and research purposes in their discipline at one university of technology in South Africa. Using in-depth interviews, we, two members of the chemistry department and the coordinator of the university writing centre, reflected on our experiences beginning, implementing, and moving the partnership forward. From this reflective process, we have realised that the team members possess particular characteristics (i.e. ways of thinking and being) that have perhaps enabled this enterprise to successful work towards its goal.

    Read article: Characterising collaboration: Reflecting on a partnership between academic support staff and lecturers to help university students learn how to write for the discipline of chemistry

  • The doors of opportunity: How do community partners experience working as co-educators in a service-learning collaboration?

    Alison Walker, Jenny Mercer, Leanne Freeman

    This article explores the experiences of organisations participating as Community Partners (CPs) and co-educators in a service-learning module in a Higher Education Institution (HEI) in South Wales, UK. It focuses on the opportunities and challenges faced by community organisations when working within the Service-learning (SL) model, and the relationship with the university and the students, including issues of expectation, assessment and identity. The partners provided SL placements of 30 hours or more in a range of community projects and organisations. These placements were intensely collaborative affairs. We researched the experiences of community partners to better understand the dynamics of the relationship; to better understand how to prepare community partners, HEIs and students; and to tease out how complex partnership projects like this one with multiple partners may be conducted successfully. A qualitative study was conducted. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Three main themes emerged from the data: Dynamic Tensions; For Each and Every One; and Broadening Horizons. The findings suggest that developing a transformation of the relationship is key to a strong and effective partnership. There needs to be active and dynamic collaboration between CPs and HEIs, including involvement in research projects like these, to better understand and navigate the pleasures and pains of successful cooperative relationships.

    Read article: The doors of opportunity: How do community partners experience working as co-educators in a service-learning collaboration?

  • Developing a university-voluntary sector collaboration for social impact

    Sarah Weakley, Paula S. Karlsson, Jane Cullingworth, Laura Lebec, Katie Fraser

    This article outlines how a team of academics, professional staff and students from a Scottish University in the United Kingdom worked with voluntary sector partners to achieve civic and ‘social purpose’ goals, through setting up a project called The Collaborative. This is a reflective paper that draws on collaborative autoethnography and is written collarboratively by that team of academics, professional staff and students. We explore how universities can achieve their civic engagement goals by serving as anchor institutions, and we develop a conceptual framework for how anchor institutions can enact their institutional mission of ‘social purpose’. We uncover important considerations for university initiatives aiming to improve academic and student engagement with community partners for social change, with three learning points around building relationships, building capacity, and barriers to engagement. Service-learning can be used as a pathway to becoming a civic university, however, there are structural barriers that need to be overcome. This is an account of an ethical fact-finding project, reflecting on our experience of working with the local voluntary sector, designed to facilitate the University’s better engagement with such collaborative ‘social purpose’ ventures.

    Read article: Developing a university-voluntary sector collaboration for social impact

  • Learning how to engage with another's point of view by intercultural, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations

    Sandra Buchmüller, Sugandh Malhotra, Corinna Bath

    The paper argues that the different dimensions of collaboration - intercultural, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary - contribute to mutual understanding and empathy. Their intersection fosters self-reflection and reveals shortcomings, blind spots, and prejudices about other cultures, disciplines, and social groups. The course aimed to overcome technology-driven design practices that tend to (re)produce stereotypes or social exclusions - often unconsciously. To make students aware of such problems, we introduced them to Feminist Science and Technology Studies, which show how dimensions such as age, class, and gender affect socio-technological participation. Moreover, we introduced user-centered and participatory design methods (contextual interviews, scenario-based design, design forecasting) that the teams had to adapt to pandemic conditions to conduct participatory research and propose design scenarios. The empirical course evaluation by the students indicates that the pedagogical concept, which we conceptualized as an extended version of a 'Third Space', allowed for intercultural, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary learning experiences and improved collective student and team performance, transcending culturally- and disciplinary-specific situatedness. In our analysis, we reflect on the power of the different forms of collaborations and their contribution to teaching future researchers, designers, and engineers how to engage with another's point of view. We consider this ability a prerequisite for acting responsibly in a globalized digital world. Results from the study are contextualized in current debates on internationalization and digitalization in the educational sciences and translated into recommendations for practitioners.

    Read article: Learning how to engage with another's point of view by intercultural, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations

  • Empowering cross-disciplinary learning through online collaboration among students and faculty from Business English, Website Building, and Accessible Design Fields

    Rita Koris, Zsuzsanna Palmer, Sushil Oswal

    Maximising students’ creative potential to address contemporary issues and fostering cross-disciplinary learning are on the agenda of both top-down and bottom-up educational initiatives. Within the framework of research about cross-disciplinary learning and collaboration, this article argues for the capacity of cross-disciplinary online collaborations to prepare students for the complexity of working in today’s interconnected, digital environment. The study presents the intricate curricular design of a cross-disciplinary collaboration project implemented by students and faculty at one European and two US universities. This multiyear project connects three university courses of different disciplines through virtual collaboration: Hungarian students in a business English course, students in Michigan preparing to engage in website building work, and students in Washington studying the field of accessible design. These three disparate disciplines are combined in a single project that integrates and applies discipline-specific knowledge acquired in each of the classes into a cross-disciplinary team assignments, where one team creates a website for the proposed business of another team with the help of accessibility advice from the third team. The analyses of student interactions from the third year of this ongoing collaboration and pre- and post-project surveys revealed that students demonstrated increased awareness of cross-disciplinary learning as well as improved effectiveness while collaborating to create cross-border solutions.

    Read article: Empowering cross-disciplinary learning through online collaboration among students and faculty from Business English, Website Building, and Accessible Design Fields

  • Emerging from the third space chrysalis: Experiences in a non-hierarchical, collaborative research community of practice

    Ed Bickle, Silvina Bishopp-Martin, Ursula Canton, Paul Chin, Ian Johnson, Ralitsa Kantcheva, Jane Nodder, Victoria Rafferty, Kiu Sum, Karen Welton

    This article discusses the creation of a research-focused virtual community of practice (vCoP) for geographically-dispersed third space professionals, motivated by desires for enhanced professional collaboration, visibility and identity. The authors used collaborative autoethnography (CAE) to evaluate their personal reflections as vCoP participants. Data were gathered in two collaborative writing activities and analysed using thematic analysis (TA). The TA identified two connected themes, which capture the vCoP members’ aspirations to transcend their current roles and be research-active through connecting with like-minded professionals. Collaborative writing activities, including authoring this paper, cultivated elements of academic identity such as independence and purpose. A non-hierarchical and supportive vCoP environment allowed the members to work beyond time and institutional constraints to foster the evolution of the community and an emerging sense of professional identity beyond that typically associated with third space roles. The paper offers a model of collaboration that could help groups in similar situations.

    Read article: Emerging from the third space chrysalis: Experiences in a non-hierarchical, collaborative research community of practice

  • Knowing me, Knowing you: Humanitas in work-integrated learning during adversity

    Patricia Lucas, Helene Wilkinson, Sally Rae, Bonnie A Dean, Michelle J Eady, Holly Capocchiano, Franziska Trede, Loletta Yuen

    Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) is a variety of learning opportunities that can extend beyond the application of theory to practice, to include complex situational, personal, material, and organisational factors. Central to forming successful WIL experiences is the partnership, support, and collaboration extended by all key stakeholders. The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted WIL experiences, with many developed partnerships and sustained practices being abruptly impacted. In 2020, a multidisciplinary group of Australasian WIL academics, administrators and students joined in weekly virtual coffee chats to share concerns and experiences during this rapidly changing educational landscape. These conversations led to establishing a Small Significant Online Network Group (SSONG) and became the basis for this article. We explored the lessons learned from WIL practitioners to be better informed of the practice of WIL and, generally, to examine the role of collaborations in higher education. Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach, this study incorporated written reflections on WIL experiences during COVID-19 lockdowns, followed by Zoom conversations to gain deeper insights. All data was aggregated and analysed thematically, both inductively and deductively, to interpret the practice experiences of individuals in their socio-cultural contexts. This article intends to demonstrate how creative solutions, such as adopting a HUMANE framework, become valuable paradigms. These enhance and nurture relationships between all WIL stakeholders, to enrich and sustain WIL experiences for all.

    Read article: Knowing me, Knowing you: Humanitas in work-integrated learning during adversity

  • Ensemble mentorship as a decolonising and relational practice in Canada

    Yvonne Poitras Pratt, Sulyn Bodnaresko, Michelle Scott

    Inspired by collaborating on a shared vision of reconciliation, three authors explore ethical relationality and the practical ways in which their heterarchical ensemble mentorship serves to decolonise and advance a shared vision of reconciliation for university teaching and learning. As Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators, we are buoyed by those developing decolonising and Indigenising strategies in formerly colonised regions. Seen as a promising interruption to a neoliberal approach to education, the authors embrace the possibilities of imagining and creating an ethical space in universities where relationality is prioritised in service of social justice. While the complex nature of reconciliation within a Canadian context begets tension and highlights what are often conflicting value systems within academe, we maintain that innovations in teaching and learning are possible in what is now a globally disrupted terrain as students, faculty, administrators, and university leadership contend with the unknown, encounter collectivist Indigenous traditions, and tentatively explore decolonisation as an ethical avenue towards inclusive and empowering education. In imagining what is possible, we build upon Indigenous knowledge traditions and the work of leadership studies scholars to propose 'ensemble mentorship' between students and faculty as a collaborative and decolonising teaching and learning practice.

    Read article: Ensemble mentorship as a decolonising and relational practice in Canada

  • Searching for the yet unknown: Writing and dancing as incantatory practices

    Kate Mattingly, Kristin Marrs

    As two ballet dancers and university educators, we began this collaborative research with a shared belief in ballet and writing as liberatory practices and a desire to confront pedagogies that rely on intimidation. Both we and our students have experienced ballet and writing classes that rely on audit-and-surveillance, and we sought to foster individuality, value differences, and cultivate agency through multimodal approaches in our ballet technique, history, and dance studies courses. During the spring semester of 2021, the history and dance studies courses were online and asynchronous; the ballet classes met in a ‘hybrid’ model: classes were held in person, with students given the option to take class via Zoom either synchronously or asynchronously. Through interviews and analysis, we found praxes that ignite curiosity and motivation by drawing from definitions of writing and dancing as incantatory practices. Notably, this is the first research that takes a capacious view of ‘ballet pedagogy’ to include history, writing, technique, and dance studies courses. Ultimately, we hope these findings support exploratory and multimodal teaching, reinforce connections among language, empowerment, and pedagogy, encourage students and educators to collaboratively challenge current practices, and motivate administrators to rethink university structures that replicate the audit-and-surveillance practices of certain ballet and writing pedagogies.

    Read article: Searching for the yet unknown: Writing and dancing as incantatory practices

  • De-territorialisations for pedagogical co-creation: Challenging traditionalistic pedagogies with students in higher education

    Jessie Bustillos Morales

    The notion of pedagogy tends to be understood as the domain of teachers, this is a reductive way of thinking about pedagogy. Instead, in this paper I explore the heteroglossia of pedagogy through the Deleuzian-Guattarian notion of assemblage. Through this approach, pedagogy is an open debate which needs to involve students to co-create the learning environment in Higher Education (HE). Drawing on data collected with first year undergraduate students and through an action research methodological approach, I will argue that collaborative and progressive pedagogies in HE must go beyond the authority of the teacher and offer students in-class opportunities to negotiate the usual power relationships that characterise traditionalistic pedagogies. Whilst there is a stronger emphasis on engaging students differently in HE, it is important to also reflect on the dynamics that emerge from initiatives that seek to redress the pedagogical imbalances that the traditionalistic classroom perpetuates, such as enforcing a prescriptive curriculum where knowledge is transferable, inert and closely policed to satisfy performative regimes of assessment. I suggest that the notion of assemblages can help us understand the solidified and accepted classroom pedagogies as territories which are still normative in education, including HE, therefore, mapping out these territories open up possibilities for de-territorialisations.

    Read article: De-territorialisations for pedagogical co-creation: Challenging traditionalistic pedagogies with students in higher education

  • Beyond the avatar: Using video cameras to achieve effective collaboration in an online second language classroom

    Vladimir Pavlov, Natalia V. Smirnova, Ekaterina Nuzhnaia

    In language learning, students learn through interaction with the teacher, the other students, and with the study material, to build language skills. What happens to interaction opportunities when learning goes online? In an online classroom, collaboration is difficult to achieve due to lack of physical proximity among the participants. This paper explores the problem of online collaboration between teachers and students in English as Foreign Language (EFL) classroom with the empirical focus on the role that video cameras play in online collaboration. We argue that cameras, although being contested as a pedagogical tool, should be seen as an important ‘proximity tool’ that helps foster collaboration by bringing learners and teachers ‘closer’. We theorise ‘collaboration’ via the social constructivism lens and argue that collaboration as being ‘close’ echoes in the digital sense with ‘being with’ and is core for developing an ecology of virtual collaboration. We draw on the online survey data from foreign language students and language instructors in one Russian research-intensive university, who were asked how they use cameras online. Quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis have been used to identify key patterns and emerging themes. The key findings of the study are that 1) cameras could be an important aspect of fostering collaboration online; 2) there is a tension in relationships between students, teachers, and study materials; 3) students and teachers differently perceive the need to use cameras, which may limit opportunities for online collaboration; and 4) while students feel more comfortable when all the other participants turn their cameras on, many do not see turning cameras on for themselves to be important. The paper concludes with a discussion of how camera use can foster online collaboration between teachers and students.

    Read article: Beyond the avatar: Using video cameras to achieve effective collaboration in an online second language classroom

  • Redesigning a sustainable English capstone course through a virtual student-faculty partnership

    Kellie Keeling, Zoë Phalen, Michael J. Rifenburg

    This collaborative essay between undergraduate students and a faculty member illustrates the importance of partnerships between students and faculty when redesigning courses. We ground this partnering in Students as Partner (SaP) praxis. SaP reinvigorates the faculty and student relationship as one in which both students and faculty serve as active agents in curriculum development, redesign, and assessment. In this essay, we introduce our partnership, locally ground our partnership, and highlight how we redesigned a sustainable English Department capstone course to include a cumulative, integrative assignment. Our partnership was not designed to lead to a quantifiable direct output (i.e., a publication or even a redesigned class); instead, our goal was to build community, to support each other, to learn, to write for ourselves and each other. We conclude by offering brief qualitative data on the effectiveness of our redesign efforts and how our approach may work as a model for redesigning courses in different contexts/institutions.

    Read article: Redesigning a sustainable English capstone course through a virtual student-faculty partnership

  • Dancing with power in ‘We are the university: Students co-creating change’

    Tai Peseta, Alex Donoghue, Sameer Hifazat, Shivani Suresh, Ashley Beathe, Jasmine Derbas, Brooke Mees, Samuel Suresh, Clementine Sugita, Thilakshi Mallawa Arachchi, Evelyn Nguyen, Lexie Johnson, Sophia Clark, Rohith Ramegowda, Jen Alford, Maria Manthos, Chinnu Jose, Emma Caughey, Vicky-Rae Reed, Max Ashcroft-Smith

    Much of the student-staff partnership literature calls for increased collaboration and power sharing among staff and students. Less common are accounts by student partners themselves that take up the challenge of what partnership and power feel like as universities embrace their neoliberal trajectory - and - purport to do so on behalf of students themselves. Especially acute is the conundrum of how partnership initiatives can, and do, reproduce the very power dynamics they set out to transform. We are a group of students and staff working in curriculum partnership together at Western Sydney University. The context of our work together is the 21C project, a university-wide strategy to transform curriculum, teaching, and learning, drawing on ‘partnership pedagogy’. In this paper, we engage in a process of reflexive inquiry to interrogate a new elective unit that many of us are involved in as advocates, co-creators, as students and staff learning together, and as evaluators, called We are the university: Students co-creating change (WATU). To highlight partnership’s intricate power plays, we offer a fictionalised account to reflect our multi-voiced experiences of being involved in WATU. We have come to understand power’s simultaneity in partnership as forms of power over, as permission-giving, as sharing (or partnership), and as the power to act (agency). The account is our story of partnership’s inevitable contradictions - a collaboration that teaches us about the challenges of working together while being cautious of partnership’s transformatory claims.

    Read article: Dancing with power in ‘We are the university: Students co-creating change’