Empowering students to enhance education at their university

This chapter analyses the development of a large institutional partnership scheme in order to demonstrate the importance of context and philosophy in shaping such schemes. All such schemes share a belief that students have valuable situated knowledge of the student experience and that they do not require further training or development to be able to offer something of value to educational practice. I argue that students may nevertheless still benefit from training; and that students are well placed to advocate for pedagogically sound practices. I highlight the important role that the institution can play as a partner in shaping projects through education strategy; and discuss the different challenges that face partnerships that are mainly student-led, staff-led or institution-led in my experience. I suggest that supervision forms a model for staff participating in partnership projects and call for further research into this and how we can encourage a contractual supervisory relationship. I also problemise the relationship between partnership work and the neoliberal agenda, suggesting that partnership can operate at macro and micro levels but neither is entirely in opposition to neoliberalism