Student Staff Partnerships: Reimagining the Familiar as a Site of Care, Courage, and Change
STADIO, September 2025
A/Prof Daniela Gachago, Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, CHED, UCT
daniela.gachago@uct.ac.za
Overview
from student as consumers to student as partners
student staff partnership in the global south
need for new agreements in our classrooms
3 case studies
SSP as decolonial practice?
Link to slides
Background
Globally resistance against ‘Students as Customers’ philosophy, push back again neoliberalism, marketisation etc…
Student as Partners
“Co-creation of the curriculum [is a] process of student engagement that encourages students and staff members to become partners, each with a voice and a stake in curriculum development” (Lubicz-Nawrocka, 2017).
SaP - opportunities and challenges
Opportunities:
Challenges:
Caveat - are we actually changing the system?
SSPs, if not authentically and critically implemented, can result in a consumerist approach to students, rather than challenging neoliberal academia, with the partnership merely increasing the availability of availing new material opportunities for the student (essentially, inducting students into academic careers by other means), rather than disrupting dominant systems (Cornelius & Bell, 2020)
…socialising students into dominant systems…
…not giving enough space for the gritty messiness of partnership (Mercer-Mapstone et al )
….respectfully mistrusting partnerships…(DeBie, 2022)
SSPs for the Global South
Growing interest / emerging field
But even great concern around institutional cultures and practices being unsupportive of SSP (Cook-Sather et al 2024; Zou, 2023; Tamim, 2024)
SSPs in SA: as a response to call for inclusion of student voices (#RMF, #FMF)
Legacies of apartheid, colonialism and racism, combined with more recent neoliberal cultures in institutions of higher learning, continue to ‘other’ students (Hlathswayo and Moloi, 2024)
Not just who to include but also how…
Sethembile Msezane, Chapungu, 2015, Archival Pigment on Cotton Rag, 111.8 x 91.8 cm, Edition of 8. University of Cape Town. © 2015- UNISA Art Collection
Can SSPs help in attempts to decolonise our classrooms?
Have we disrupted coloniality?
“... coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day’ �(Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243)
Coloniality as manifested in the rules that govern our classrooms
Tema Okun, https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/
Laura Rendon, Emerita Professor, Uni of Texas
Need for new agreements in the classroom…
…."unitive in nature, emphasising the balanced, harmonic relationship between concepts, such as intellectualism and intuition, teaching and learning, the learner and learning material, and Western and Non-Western ways of knowing" �(Rendón 2009, p. 1).
What would you like �to know from your students? �What challenges would you like to tackle with them?
Case study 1: Discussion forum in HES Masters Class
Challenge: Weekly discussions count towards 10% of final course mark. Low engagement in discussion forum. Consultation of students around alternative formats for discussions with students.
Solution: Weekly meetings of students facilitated by one student to engage in discussions on readings. Student facilitator creates summary of discussion and submits it. Discussions feed into weekly reflections.
Feedback: “Discussion between us was much more productive than the Forum”
Case study 2: Onboarding new students into existing cohort - Learning Design Models short course
Design Challenge: 20 portuguese-speaking participants from the University of Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo have expressed their interest in joining the short course Learning Design Models last minute. They will each pay the short course fee (5500 ZAR per person). These participants are UEM lecturers across various disciplines. They also vary in age. They have access to a computer and internet but have various degrees of english language proficiency. Also, they are new to BOLD and very likely to the field of learning design. How can we redesign the short course to accommodate these extra participants? Think of limitations (ie time, budget, technology, language, facilitation)
Design Dash Solutions
translation of materials/resources
portuguese speaking facilitators
different onboarding spaces/meetings
shared spaces and parallel spaces (online/offline)
iterative feedback loops
choice
18
Case Study 3: Designing for Social Justice Programme
How might we contextualise student staff partnerships within African Higher Education?
What unique opportunities and challenges are there for SSPs in SA?
How would african-centred decolonial SSPs look like?
Our team: 11 students and staff members
Three-year Collaborative Project between 3 Universities in the Western Cape (South Africa):
CPUT - Largest and only university of technology in the Western Cape - a product of multiple merged institutions from old technikon structures
UWC - Historically Black / disadvantaged University
UCT - Historically White/ privileged / research intensive University
Our programme - Designing for Social Justice Partnership
Socially Just Learning Design
Partnership to
How can we operationalise these values?
Tema Okun, https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/
Mid Programme Reflection exercise
Agreements
Begin with Trust and Generous Assumptions: We start from a place of mutual trust, believing that each person brings good intentions and a shared commitment to the work.
Engage with Courage, Honesty and Care: We speak honestly about how we feel and what we experience, especially when it’s uncomfortable.
Honour Relationality and Navigate Conflict Together: We value connection over competition, and we work through tensions collaboratively, recognising that discomfort can be generative when held with compassion.
Work from Strengths and Share Power: We aim to lead from our strengths, share leadership, and ensure that decisions are made transparently and inclusively
Agreements
Embrace Imperfection and Non-Linearity: We accept that justice work is messy and evolving. We resist perfectionism, give ourselves room to fail and revise.
Balance Process and Product: We give equal value to how we work and what we produce. We reflect on our pace and priorities, ensure emotional readiness, and uphold our collective purpose without sacrificing care.
Respect Time, Capacity and Well-being: We honour each other’s time, energy, and boundaries. We normalise rest, acknowledge emotional labour, and recognise that sustainability is a political and personal commitment.
Create Inclusive, Accessible and Celebratory Spaces: We commit to clear, transparent communication and equitable sharing of information.
How do we move to different working agreements?
Rules that normally govern our classrooms
Tema Okun, https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/
Some learnings as we move along the continuum…
BUT it also…
“Our reflection process helped us recommit—not just to social justice outcomes, but to how we get there.”
Ngoasheng et al 2019
Critical hope
Zembylas (2022: 30) asks us to 'theorize a mode of hope that is explicitly anti-colonial, namely, an understanding of hope that not only recognizes the legacy of colonialism, domination and exploitation, but also finds ways to resist to this”
Where can you see critical hope in your own practice? Where are those cracks?
Partnership principles
Five partnership principles emerged from an analysis of our reflections:
Mosienyane et al (in press). Critical hope in South African higher education: Using a Theory of Change approach for mid-project reflection on a student-staff partnership programme. Special issue on Critical Hope. Open Cultural Studies.
What would you like �to know from your students? �What challenges would you like to tackle with them?
And how would you go about this?
“Growing the world we want is like the slow tending of a garden, transforming the plants by fostering relationships, trust, skills, community accountability, and healing. It requires cultivating new habits internally, seeding restorative ways of being together interpersonally, uprooting practices of inequality institutionally, and planting alternative possibilities structurally.”
(Ruha Benjamin, 2022, p. 54)
Please join us for the SAP roundtable next week
Link to online registration
Laura Rendon, �Emerita Professor, Uni of Texas
References
Cook-Sather, A. 2010. ‘Students as learners and teachers: Taking responsibility, transforming education, and redefining accountability’. Curriculum inquiry, 40(4), 555–575.
Cook‐Sather, A. & Agu, P. 2013. ‘16: Student consultants of color and faculty members working together toward culturally sustaining pedagogy’. To improve the aAademy, 32(1): 271–285.
Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C. & Felten, P. 2014. Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching: A Guide for Faculty. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
Cook-Sather, A., Ho, L., Kaur, A. & Tamim, T. 2024. ‘Translating pedagogical partnership in/to academic staff development in the global south’. Academic Staff Development: Disruptions, Complexities, Change (Envisioning new Futures). Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 39-66.
Cornelius-Bell, A. & Bell, P. A. 2020. ‘Partnership as student power’. The Radical Teacher, 118: 21–30.
deBie (2022). Applying a Mad politics of partnership’. Teaching in Higher Education, 27(6), 717–737. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1736023
Lubicz-Nawrocka, T. M. 2019. 'More than just a student': How co-creation of the curriculum fosters third spaces in ways of working, identity, and impact’. International Journal for Students as Partners, 3(1): 34–49. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v3i1.3727
Hlatshwayo, M. N. & Moloi, T. M. 2024. ‘The neoliberal turn in higher education: Pitfalls, challenges, possibilities in the global South’. Transformation in Higher Education, 9(2): 1-2. https://doi.org/10.4102/the.v9i0.477
Mercer-Mapstone, L., Dvorakova, S. L., Matthews, K. E., Abbot, S., Cheng, B., Felten, P., ... & Swaim, K. 2017. ‘A systematic literature review of students as partners in higher education’. International Journal for Students as Partners, 1(1): 15-37. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v1i1.3119
Ngoasheng, A., Cupido, X., Oyekola, S., Gachago, D., Mpofu, A., & Mbekela, Y. 2019. Advancing democratic values in higher education through open curriculum co-creation: Towards an epistemology of uncertainty. In L. E. Quinn, ed. Reimaging Curricula: Spaces for Disruption. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media: 324–344. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1nzfzm1.21?
Rendón, L. 2009. Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social justice, and Liberation. Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Rendón, L. I. 2005. ‘Recasting agreements that govern teaching and learning: An intellectual and spiritual framework for transformation’. Religion and Education, 32(1), 79–108. DOI: 10.1080/15507394.2005.10012352
Tamim, T. 2024. ‘Journeys of decolonization in higher education through Student-faculty/staff partnerships’. Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 1(42): 12.
Zou, T., Kochhar-Lindgren, G., Hoang, P., Lam, K., Barry, T. & Leung, L. Y. Y. 2023. ‘Facilitating students as partners: Coresearching with undergraduates in Asian university contexts’. Educational Review, 76 (6): 1562-1580 DOI: 10.1080/00131911.2023.2246674
The Designing for Social Justice Partnership Programme (DSJP) is a UCDP Collab initiative funded by the Department for Higher Education and Training. It is a collaboration between the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town. For more info visit https://www.cput.ac.za/dsjp or email dsjp@cput.ac.za