According to the Oxford’s Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL), student-staff partnerships are “a form of student engagement where students and staff work together to achieve a specific aim. Incorporating this approach to teaching and learning activities can lead to positive personal and educational transformations, enriching the educational experience for [everyone].”1
I’m delighted that CTL has written a little case study that features my and my colleague’s teaching in the termly Christian Ethics seminar– a seminar that is designed specifically for, and with, our excellent group of masters students. The full case study can be found through the link below.
What did you learn from working in partnership?
By taking this approach to our seminars, I have learned that co-creation can cultivate a supportive learning environment where students feel valued, included and empowered to actively participate in their educational journey. Involving students in this way has also been a much more productive way of enhancing students’ teaching and learning than anything I could do on my own, especially in my efforts to make the course more inclusive and accessible.
In this approach, there is the potential for seminar discussions to drift off topic or into rabbit holes due to their student-driven nature. However, we have found that by scaffolding the discussions with directive prompts and stepping in to direct seminar discussions back to the assignment when needed, staff can combine our subject knowledge with students’ knowledge of their own interests and future goals to co-create the seminars’ learning directions in line with course learning objectives. The student-led nature of this approach also enables us to learn about what students are interested in and design assessments that reflect these interests, furthering the course’s inclusive, student-centred practices.
Edward A. David 
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