International Journal for Academic Development

ISSN: 1360-144X (Print) 1470-1324 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rija20

Student-faculty partnership in explorations of

pedagogical practice: a threshold concept in
academic development
Alison Cook-Sather
To cite this article: Alison Cook-Sather (2014) Student-faculty partnership in explorations of
pedagogical practice: a threshold concept in academic development, International Journal for
Academic Development, 19:3, 186-198, DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2013.805694
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2013.805694

Published online: 08 Jun 2013.

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Date: 11 January 2017, At: 04:17

International Journal for Academic Development, 2014

Vol. 19, No. 3, 186198, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2013.805694

Student-faculty partnership in explorations of pedagogical

practice: a threshold concept in academic development
Alison Cook-Sather*
Education Program, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, USA
(Received 13 November 2012; nal version received 4 January 2013)
Student-faculty partnerships position students as informants, participants, and
change agents in collaboration with faculty members. Enacting one form of such
collaboration, Bryn Mawr Colleges SaLT program pairs faculty members and
undergraduate students in explorations of pedagogical practice. The program
provides both context and case study for this form of student-faculty partnership
as a threshold concept in academic development. Like all threshold concepts,
the notion of student-faculty partnership is troublesome, transformative, irreversible, and integrative. This article draws on faculty reections to explore what
constitutes this threshold, the insights and practices that are possible if faculty
cross it, and implications for academic developers.
Keywords: reective practice; student-faculty partnership; threshold concept

Threshold concepts in academic development

While threshold concepts have been explored most extensively in relation to
undergraduate students learning within various disciplines (Barradell, 2013; Meyer &
Land, 2005; Taylor, 2008), there also has been work on threshold concepts in academic development, where the learners are teachers (Blackie, Case, & Jawitz, 2010;
Carmichael, 2012; Irvine & Carmichael, 2009; Kinchin & Miller, 2012; King &
Felten, 2012; Land, Cousin, Meyer, & Davies, 2005). This work throws into relief
both established norms the disciplinary tribes and territories (Carmichael, 2012)
according to which faculty traditionally identify and locate themselves and recent
innovations in higher education, including efforts to shift from faculty-centered to
student-centered pedagogical approaches (Backie et al., 2010) and explorations of
academic identity (McLean, 2012).
Meyer and Land (2006) have dened threshold concepts as conceptual gateways or portals that lead to a transformed view of something (p. 19). They tend
to be characterized by certain qualities: not only are they transformative, they are
also irreversible (unlikely to be forgotten, or unlearned only through considerable
effort), and integrative (exposing previously hidden interrelatedness) (Land et al.,
2005, p. 53, emphasis in the original). Because they require a shift in understanding, and an accompanying shift in learner subjectivity (Land et al., 2005, p. 53),
they can be troublesome. In academic development, it is essential to be aware of
*Email: acooksat@brynmawr.edu
2013 Taylor & Francis

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the ways in which faculty identity and authority might be at once troubled and
supported as faculty members wrestle with threshold concepts. Particularly in the
context of shifts toward student-centered approaches to teaching, Cousin (2010) has
suggested that, we need a restoration of dignity for academic teachers by placing
them alongside students and educational researchers rather than above or below
them (p. 6). This issue is particularly relevant to the present discussion.
In the following pages, I argue that student-faculty partnership in explorations
of pedagogical practice is a threshold concept in academic development: it is an
idea that has the power to transform the way educators understand the teaching
and learning process and their role in it (King & Felten, 2012, p. 5; Werder,
Thibou, & Kaufer, 2012). A subset of the broader concepts of students as producers
(Neary & Winn, 2009), researchers (Healey & Jenkins, 2009), and change agents
(Dunne & Zandstra, 2011; Healey, 2012), the partnership model I focus on here
constitutes a form of radical collegiality (Fielding, 1999) through which students
are full partners with faculty in analyses and revisions of pedagogical practice
(Bovill, Cook-Sather, & Felten, 2011; Cook-Sather, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011b;
Cook-Sather, Bovill, & Felten, forthcoming). Initially troublesome, given the
norms in higher education that clearly distinguish faculty and student roles and
responsibilities, once embraced, the notion of such student-faculty partnership is
transformative, irreversible, and integrative and promises both greater intersubjectivity (King, 2012) and a more person-centered (Blackie et al., 2010; Fielding, 2011)
approach to teaching and learning.
The Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program at Bryn Mawr College
provides both context and case study for this discussion. After a brief description of
the program and the methodology used to analyze the pedagogical inquiry it
supports, I explore this form of student-faculty partnership as troublesome, transformative, irreversible, and integrative, drawing on faculty reections to illuminate
what constitutes this threshold (the barriers to understanding, engagement, and
progress) and to identify what insights and practices (what understandings of teaching and learning and faculty and student roles within those) are possible if faculty
cross the threshold. I have discussed elsewhere students experiences in the SaLT
program (Cook-Sather, 2010, 2011a, 2011b; Cook-Sather & Agu, 2012, 2013;
Cook-Sather & Alter, 2011); in this discussion, I focus on faculty experiences. An
area of further inquiry might be how student-faculty partnerships of the kind I
discuss here are a threshold concept for students (Werder et al., 2012).
The SaLT program
The SaLT program is part of The Andrew W. Mellon Teaching and Learning
Institute at Bryn Mawr College. Supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation
and by the Provosts at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, the program invites
undergraduate students to take up the paid position of pedagogical consultant to college faculty. Faculty and student pairs work in semester-long partnerships to analyze, afrm, and revise the faculty members pedagogical approaches in a course as
s/he teaches it (see Cook-Sather, 2008, 2009, 2011b). Since the advent of the SaLT
program, 158 faculty members and 95 student consultants have participated in a
total of over 230 faculty-student partnerships.
Faculty range in teaching experience from 0 to 45 years, span academic divisions, and choose to participate in the program for a variety of reasons, including:

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A. Cook-Sather

to help them get oriented to the colleges if they are new, to address a particular
pedagogical issue, or simply to refresh their practice. Each week, the student consultant observes her faculty partners classroom using a clinical form of observation
notes, with columns for time, observations, and reections. She shares her observation notes with her partner and meets weekly with him or her to discuss what is
working well and what might be revised. She might also conduct mid-semester or
other forms of feedback gathering and work with her faculty partner to develop or
revise various aspects of the course.
Student consultants are sophomores through seniors enrolled as undergraduates
at Bryn Mawr or nearby Haverford College. They major in different elds, claim
different identities, and bring varying degrees of formal preparation in educational
studies (from those with no coursework in education to those pursuing state certication to teach at the secondary level). Students apply for this position (they must
submit an explanation of how they are qualied for the role, procure letters of recommendation from a faculty or staff member and a student, and sign a condentiality agreement) and they may not be enrolled in a course to which they are assigned
as consultants. They attend an orientation, receive a set of guidelines for developing
partnerships with faculty members, and participate in weekly meetings with other
consultants and me as coordinator of the program to discuss how best to partner
with faculty in the work of developing productively challenging and engaging
classrooms and courses.
Methodology
Since the inception of the SaLT program, I have maintained an action research project to study and revise it: I have engaged in collective, collaborative, self-reective,
and critical inquiry (McCutcheon & Jung, 1990) that integrates action and research
to challenge the routines of the status quo (Somekh & Zeichner, 2009). Data sources
for this project include audiotaped conversations of weekly meetings of student
consultants and selected meetings with faculty participants, mid- and end-of-semester
feedback from student and faculty participants, and follow-up interviews. These data
sources have been transcribed and coded using constant comparison/grounded theory
(Creswell, 2006; Strauss, 1987), in order to determine themes and trends in the
experiences and perspectives of participants. I regularly invite student consultants to
collaborate with me in data analysis and in authoring articles, chapters, and conference papers (e.g. Cook-Sather & Agu, 2012, 2013; Cook-Sather & Alter, 2011;
Cook-Sather, Cohen, & Shumate, 2009) and I share drafts of these with participants,
thus ensuring that my analyses resonate with their experiences.
All participants understand the feedback gathered to be for purposes of reecting for themselves and for documenting and disseminating the work of the SaLT
program. Integrating students into the cycle of interpretation and action (Rodgers,
2002) that constitutes reective practice, the SaLT program models a fresh approach
to reecting on knowledge in action (Schon, 1987, p. 12) and provides participants with a unique forum within which to access and revise their assumptions,
engage in reective discourse, and take action in their work (Cook-Sather, 2008,
2011a; Lawler, 2003; Mezirow, 1991).
Like students in traditional disciplines when they encounter threshold concepts,
faculty have a range of responses when they encounter the concept of and challenge
to embrace partnership with students in pedagogical explorations and revisions. I

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draw on faculty reections in mid- and end-of-semester feedback and in follow-up

interviews to identify both the qualities of the threshold what constitutes barriers
to understanding and engagement and the insights and experiences faculty have,
once they have crossed over the threshold.
Student-faculty partnership as troublesome
Among the qualities that can make threshold concepts troublesome are that they
appear alien, or counter-intuitive or even intellectually absurd at face value
(Meyer & Land, 2003, p. 2) and they often conict with long held assumptions
(King & Felten, 2012, p. 6). The idea of students as knowers and partners in pedagogical conversations is counterintuitive to many a faculty; it contradicts prevailing
notions that students do not have the understanding or experience to inform teaching practice and that faculty developers or colleagues are best positioned to inform
and guide faculty learning. But as Land (2011) argues, signicant learning needs
to be troublesome so as to provoke learners to move on from their prevailing
way of conceptualizing a particular phenomenon to new ways of seeing (p. 176;
see also Dewey, 1916/1980). The concept of student-faculty partnership in pedagogical explorations is troublesome because it is at once counterintuitive for many faculty and contradictory to norms in higher education. As a result, it can be
threatening, disappointing, and/or (potentially) productively unsettling.
Partnership as threatening
A key component of this particular threshold is the calling into question of what
faculty expect of students what they think students role in higher education can
be. When a student is positioned as a consultant and partner rather than a subordinate and disciple, fear, distrust, or other negative assumptions can inform faculty
perceptions. These can be challenges for faculty at all points in their careers; but,
new faculty members are particularly susceptible, in part because they have not yet
established their own sense of authority. One new faculty member reected on his
perception of how working with a student consultant affected his course:
I had a very active group of students with strong opinions, and the course covered a
lot of volatile topics. Even though it was not meant to be evaluative, the presence of
the student consultant observing every class gave the students license to be very critical of me and how I run the class. My student consultant often sided with the students
in her feedback. I felt very vulnerable, disempowered, and under observation (in an
unproductive manner).

While it is rare for faculty to experience their partnerships with student consultants
in this way, this example is important for what it reveals about the challenge of seeing students as partners rather than adversaries as allies both to students and the
faculty member, in whose course those students are enrolled.
Partnership as disappointing
Another, more common experience of the threshold of student-faculty partnership in
pedagogical explorations is the feeling of disappointment when student consultants
do not offer new information or insights. As one faculty member put it:

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It is a rare occasion that a student [consultant at one of our meetings] says something that
I have not already heard a student say before, or that I could have anticipated a student
would say. I must admit that I have been both surprised and disappointed by this fact.

Reactions like this indicate a resistance to reection. They represent dismissal

and distancing rather than embracing of what student consultants provide as a different angle on a particular issue relevant to teaching and learning. Even if the
insight is familiar, it could be explored, challenged, and complicated through questioning and sharing of similar or different perspectives. Rejecting student perspectives as old news also reveals resistance to pursuing a relationship through which
faculty might take time to learn what it feels like to students to experience learning.
In short, reactions like the one above point to the challenge faculty face of letting
go of earlier, comfortable positions and encountering less familiar and sometimes
disconcerting new territory (Land et al., 2005, p. 54).
Partnership as productively disruptive
A different manifestation of the troublesome nature of this threshold and a
striking contrast to the forms that constitute versions of fear of or resistance to
engaging with students as partners is the quality of productive disruption
(Felten, 2011; Glasser & Powers, 2011) some faculty experience when they partner
with students. One experienced faculty member, in reference to one of her partnerships with a student consultant of color, explained:
[My student consultants] highlighting of the issue of how I bring myself into the
classroom made me conscious of my self in an unaccustomed and uneasy way, such
that I needed to reconsider my understanding, and to see it (uncomfortably) in light of
my own positioning as a white person.

This faculty member uses terms that signal troublesomeness unaccustomed,

uneasy, and uncomfortably within a space of liminality and models a willing
crossing of the threshold to rethink her understanding of her role in the teaching
and learning process. She readily embraces the troublesomeness prompted by her
partnership with a student consultant as a catalyst to critical reection on her
understanding and practice.
Moving from troublesome toward transformative
One faculty member offered a thoughtful analysis of the threshold that this form of
student-faculty partnership constitutes, illuminating why faculty might feel either
threatened by or dismissive of it. Sharing her insight into how one could move
from being troubled to being transformed, she wrote:
I think when most faculty hear of a program in which students are involved as
commentators and collaborators, they assume that the program is giving the students
unfettered authority or equality in the teaching process. Or that the program is
imposing the students authority into the teaching equation.

Such a perceived challenge to faculty authority would be understandably met

with resistance or rejection. But, the SaLT program does not aim for that kind of
replacing of faculty authority with student authority; rather, it asks faculty to take

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students seriously as partners; to interpret and interact with their perspectives, not
follow them as prescriptions; and to let student experiences and insights productively trouble faculty members assumptions and interpretations. As this faculty
member explained in reference to her own passing over the threshold:
I have to listen to my consultant (and my students more broadly) with a more multiaural ear, hearing everything they say, generously ltering out the more nave and
unreasonable requests or analyses, but then resisting the temptation to be defensive or
dismissive and instead listening AGAIN to what theyve said in order to get to the
core of truth and productiveness underlying their comments.

This more active and interactive engagement leads to a resituating of ones self in
relation to students and their perspectives, what this faculty member describes as
carefully reecting on and analyzing student perspectives and then addressing the
core concerns behind them in a way that is consistent with my overall goals and
values. Such a dialogic and relational approach actually reinforces faculty authority,
as it legitimates student authority, making way for profound change in attitude and
in practice. In this faculty members words again:
When I took the time to really do this around the midterm, it made me see myself and
my course in very different terms and it made it possible to change the way I was
approaching things so as to improve and simplify the course in good ways.

This extended analysis suggests how teachers can work alongside students
(Cousin, 2010, p. 6) in explorations of teaching and learning. If faculty can
recognize students as differently positioned knowers with insights to share as
partners in exploration but not ultimate authorities, they experience, as the faculty
member quoted at length above put it, a real paradigm shift in my attitude toward
students contributions to the way a class can be run. Contrary to the feared loss
of authority and control against which some faculty members react, reunderstanding
teaching and learning as more collaborative processes can, as this same faculty
member expressed, be quite liberating.
Student-faculty partnership as transformative
As Land et al. (2005) have explained, Grasping a threshold concept is never just a
cognitive shift; it might also involve a repositioning of self in relation to the subject (p. 58). Because the subject in this case is teaching and learning and teacher
and student roles within those processes, this form of student-faculty partnership as
a threshold concept requires a rethinking and changing of roles. When faculty members embrace such rethinking and change, a whole new world of understanding and
practice opens up to them. They may start in a place of uncertainty or concern, but
crossing the threshold transforms their sense of students and of themselves in
relation to the processes of teaching and learning and to the content of their
courses. The transformation is emotional as well as cognitive.
Rethinking teacher and student roles
Two faculty members quoted in previous sections of this discussion came up
against and were hindered by this threshold; one because he felt threatened by the
student consultants presence and participation rather than embracing her as a

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partner and the other because she felt uninterested in or uninspired by the student
consultants contributions to analyses of classroom practice. While these faculty
members stopped at the threshold during their early participation in the SaLT
program, they crossed it subsequently.
A year after he participated in the SaLT program, the faculty member who had
felt vulnerable to his active group of students with strong opinions and his consultants afrmation of their perspectives had shifted from a sense of students being
adversaries to students being partners in analyzing and navigating his course. About
this change in his interactions with students, he said in an interview: I feel less that
I am transmitting and that its more of a transaction.
After conducting mid-semester feedback, the faculty member who was disappointed that students did not have anything new to say shifted her thinking entirely,
talking in an animated way about the power of the conversation she had with her
students and the ways she had revised her course, based on the mid-semester feedback from those students that her student consultant had gathered and analyzed with
her. In her nal reections on this experience, she asserted that this partnership
approach made her a better scholar, as well as teacher, as it allowed her to integrate
the various dimensions of her identity indeed, to co-construct them with students.
These shifts in thinking about teacher and student roles are transformative; they
change what is perceived and what is possible. They are emotional as well as intellectual reconceptualizations of students capacities to analyze pedagogical practice,
and they lead to greater openness in faculty to engage in critical reection on
practice and in partnership with students.
Managing the emotional shift
In their reections, faculty members use emotionally charged words to describe their
experiences of encountering and embracing student-faculty partnership: vulnerable,
disappointed, uneasy, and liberating. As Cousin (2010) has pointed out, the
crossing (or recrossing) of the limen is not simply a cognitive movement because it
involves a strong emotional dimension concerning the students identication with
both the subject and his perceived capabilities (p. 4). Faculty members identities as
teachers their perceived capabilities and understanding are at stake in these partnerships. If they think of themselves as autonomous or at least authoritative knowers
about teaching, they are not likely to cross this threshold. If, however, they take the
emotional as well as intellectual and professional risk of recognizing students as
equally albeit differently knowledgeable about teaching and learning, then they are
more likely to cross the threshold and partner with students.
In an interview, several faculty, who had partnered with student consultants
through the SaLT program, talked about the change in their self concept as a result
of this work. One described a shift from feeling, Well, this is vulnerable! to a
recognition that vulnerability becomes its opposite not like invulnerable but
maybe condence, strength, courage Another faculty member asserted: Its
condence building, and a third said, Its just natural. What you perceive as being
vulnerable in the beginning you realize is just natural interaction. These seeming
contradictions what seems to create vulnerability actually making you stronger
and more condent and courageous and what seems unnatural becoming natural
represent transformed understandings and experiences faculty can achieve if they
cross the threshold of student-faculty partnership.

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Student-faculty partnership as integrative and irreversible

Once a threshold has been crossed, once a new concept has been integrated into
ones way of thinking and being, it is virtually impossible to un-know it; one cannot easily go back to a previous way of seeing or being. This quality of threshold
concepts takes multiple forms in relation to student-faculty partnership in explorations of pedagogical practice, including an enduring expansion of perspective, a sustaining of dialog with student consultants, and a reconceptualization of all students
as partners.

Expanding perspective
One way in which faculty perspectives and experiences are irreversibly transformed
through partnerships with student consultants is actually quite literal. One faculty
member explained how his consultant was able to observe, as he put it, what I cannot from my vantage point. This professor emphasized that he meant this not only
guratively but also literally, as she has a line of sight into the space of the classroom which I do not have from where I stand.
This line of sight illuminates the classroom in new ways; as this faculty member explained about his student consultants perspective: Her observations have
helped to open up for me the space in the classroom in ways which I have not seen
before. Once that space is opened up, it stays open; faculty members never see the
classroom in the same way again and they actively seek ways to keep the new
angles of vision open.

Sustaining dialog with student consultants

Complementing the literal new angles of vision and the accompanying new perspectives faculty gain through embracing student-faculty partnership is a change in the
way they understand the teaching and learning processes and their role in those.
About the way this change begins to unfold during the time of the partnership, one
faculty member explained:
I like that her presence her comments, but her presence itself too not only gives
me the benet of her lighthouse-like observations, but makes me observe from the
same kind of remove, even as I am engaged in the everyday work of teaching the
class. This split experience of my class as an immediate act and experience, but also a
larger narrative that Im looking down upon, is something I hope to carry into all my
teaching.

Other faculty members explain how they carry that split experience a kind of
poly-perspectival awareness into their teaching after the partnership with a particular student consultant has ended. One faculty member said: The student consultant
voice remains in my head during lectures [and] discussions and I am trying to
rethink my presentations or view them from a student perspective while talking.
Another explained that: The student consultant presence never entirely goes away.
The little Tiffany in my ear. These phrases carry into all my teaching; remains
in my head; and never entirely goes away argue for the integrative and irreversible nature of student-faculty partnership once embraced; faculty continue to
partner with their consultants by evoking their perspectives.

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Reconceptualizing all students as partners

The way participants in the SaLT program understand the teaching and learning
process and their role in it is transformed not only within partnerships in the program between participating faculty and student consultants but, more broadly,
between faculty and all their students as a result of this work. This transformation
carries particularly signicant implications for teaching and learning in college
classrooms more broadly. While student consultants are trained through an orientation and supported in weekly meetings, these are really very simple forms of inviting students into partnership and supporting them in developing language and
capacity to name what they know about teaching and learning. Any student invited
into such partnership can develop some such capacity.
One faculty member explained that, as a result of her participation in the SaLT
program: Im working with students more fully or intensively from the perspective
that we are all learners and all teachers. Another faculty member used very similar
terms:
I work with students more as colleagues, more as people engaged in similar struggles
to learn and grow. I have become even more convinced that students are experts in
learning and essential partners in the task of creating and developing new courses and
rening existing ones.

One faculty member offered an extended example of this change in the way he
thought about teaching and learning and his work with students. In reecting on his
interactions with students enrolled in his courses after a semester during which he
worked with a student consultant, he captured his transformation and the capacity
his students developed because he considered them partners. He explained that he
had always made changes to adjust course content and process to match student
interests and needs; but, the transformation was in the way he conceptualized those
changes: I had always seen that as a process of me adjusting things for them.
Shifting from me/them to us, he explained:
Mid-way through the semester of working with my Student Consultant, I realized that
I was thinking about my class in a more collaborative way than I had before: I was
thinking about building the course with the students, as partners.

He described several occasions on which he and individual students enrolled in his

course had reconceptualized assignments, taken those back to the class, and gotten
positive feedback on the results. In his words: The students and I were engaged in
building this class together. This embracing of student-faculty partnership was
prompted and modeled by his work with his student consultant. As he explained it:
I believe this change arose directly from my experience collaborating with my Student Consultant, and I think its taken my teaching to an amazing new level both
for my students, and for me personally.
Once faculty embrace a partnership model, they seek multiple ways to partner
with students beyond the connes of the courses they are teaching. These efforts
include bringing students together to plan courses (Shore, 2012) and working with
students in a variety of ways to develop, teach, and assess innovative new programs
(Cohen, Hein, & Donnay, 2012). They take up partnership as a forum for and
catalyst of ongoing reective practice.

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Implications for academic developers

When someone listens to you, you feel a surge of trust in them. The wind blows your
bad thoughts and frustration they gave you when they werent listening away.
Morgan Cook-Sather, Age 9.

My daughter wrote these words during a poetry workshop at her school. They
are about listening and trust, the foundations of relationship and the inspiration
for partnership. But they are far from the norm. The bad thoughts and frustration that many students and faculty feel are a result of a lack of listening,
trust, and productive exchange between differently positioned participants in
education.
Attending to students experiences and perspectives and embracing students as
partners and change agents in explorations of pedagogical practice constitute a
threshold concept in academic development because of the ways in which faculty
and students are traditionally positioned in relationship to one another and to
knowledge construction about teaching and learning. Crossing the threshold of
this form of student-faculty partnership changes in deep and productive ways both
how educators understand the teaching and learning process and their role in it
and how students take up their education and their relationships with teachers
within it.
Academic developers who wish to support faculty members in crossing this
threshold might offer both faculty and students opportunities to reect critically on
their roles and responsibilities in teaching and learning. Having the opportunity for
such reection, unfortunately rare in higher education, can prompt revision; inviting
faculty and students into dialog with one another can inspire mutual trust and
greater openness to a partnership model. Another approach is to invite individual
faculty members to identify places in their existing curriculum and pedagogy where
collaboration with students might be possible. A co-developed assignment, portion
of a course, or grading rubric might be a place to start.
Although this discussion highlights the one-on-one dimension of student-faculty
collaborations in explorations of pedagogical practice, the notion of partnership can
be extended far beyond this conguration (see Cook-Sather et al., forthcoming).
Building on the various ways that faculty consult and collaborate with students in
their courses, academic developers and individual faculty members could replicate
this partnership model through providing designated forums for reection, dialog,
and revision within and beyond classrooms (Dunne & Zandstra, 2011; Healey,
2012; Little, 2011; Neary & Winn, 2009; Werder et al., 2012).
Providing opportunities for student-faculty partnership in higher education,
particularly those that open up discussions among subject specialists, students and
educational researchers, creating forms of transactional curriculum inquiry between
these three parties (Cousin, 2010, p. 7), can support both faculty and students in
embracing a partnership model and thereby transform teaching and learning into
shared responsibilities of faculty and students. The poly-perspectival,
person-centered approach to teaching and learning that student-faculty partnership
models and calls for has the potential to effect a profound change in the way
educators and students understand the teaching and learning process and their
role in it.

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A. Cook-Sather

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Peter Felten, Katie King, Deandra Little, and Elliott Shore for reading drafts of
this article and to two anonymous reviewers and Mick Healey for their suggestions.

Notes on contributor
Alison Cook-Sather is professor of Education and coordinator of The Andrew W. Mellon
Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr College. Co-author, with Catherine Bovill
and Peter Felten, of Engaging students as partners in teaching & learning: A guide for
faculty (Jossey-Bass, forthcoming), she has published widely on student voice and
participation in teacher preparation and academic development.

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