Student-Faculty Partnership in Assessment: Encountering Emotion and Enhancing Wellbeing in Students

In the context of increasing wellbeing challenges in higher education, partnership working involving faculty, students and other stakeholders, within and beyond the curriculum at the course, programme and institutional level, has the potential to help students and staff work positively with their emotions and to promote resilient academic behaviours and positive wellbeing. In so doing, there are challenges for both students and faculty as they consciously encounter emotion within the affective domain. Partnership spaces of learning can be considered as borderland spaces (Hill et al., 2016, 2018); unfamiliar territories that effectively displace those who enter them, and whose novelty and uncertainty thereby challenge students and faculty, engaging a range of emotions. But persisting in these spaces can be transformative for all concerned, irreversibly changing knowledge, emotions, attitudes and behaviour and permitting new and previously inaccessible ways of thinking and practising (Meyer and Land, 2006). While a large number of studies have explored the nature, benefits and challenges of pedagogic partnerships in higher education (Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017), emotion and wellbeing are rarely foregrounded (Felten, 2017). In this session, we call for theoretical and empirical avenues of enquiry examining how pedagogic partnerships, in a variety of forms, are being/might be developed for positive benefit to enhance wellbeing in modern-day higher education communities. We encourage submissions that will critically examine the potential opportunities and challenges of pedagogic partnership in encountering emotion and enhancing faculty and/or student self-efficacy, resilience and wellbeing. Pedagogic approaches that may be examined include but are not restricted to: social pedagogies such as fieldwork, group work, inquiry-based learning, research-based learning and authentic assessment; hospitable and compassionate pedagogy; contemplative pedagogy; courageous pedagogy; and heutagogy. Thematic areas for reflection might include: student-led induction/transitions; community/work-based learning, co-pedagogy and the emotional labour of teaching (amongst/between academic staff, professional services staff and wider stakeholders); student-faculty and peer-to-peer assessment dialogue; student-faculty and peer-to-peer working in the field; academic personal tutoring; Peer Assisted Learning; student pedagogic consultancy; student-faculty and peer-to-peer co-research