Co-designing a Community of Practice for Students as Partners in Partnership

This report details how a professional learning program (community of practice) to support staff and students engaged in partnership on learning and teaching was codesigned through student-staff partnership. Students as Partners (SaP) is about meaningful relationships between students and staff that aim to positively transform teaching, learning, and the student/staff experience (ITaLI, n.d.; Matthews, 2016). The University of Queensland (UQ) Student Strategy 2016-2020 identified SaP as one of the key initiatives to realise UQ’s new ambitious vision and is currently funding 11 pilot partnership projects across UQ involving 27 students and 26 staff collaborating as partners. Involvement in student-staff partnership is not straightforward, and what constitutes SaP is still being explored and understood across the university. Supporting those engaging in SaP to foster mutual learning is vital to the success of SaP at UQ. Communities of Practice (CoP) promote a culture of shared learning that contributes to the development of its members’ knowledge and expertise (Wenger, 2001). The UQ SaP CoP was co-created through student-staff partnership and co-funded by the UQ Winter Research Program (UQ Student Employability Centre, 2017) and the OLT Fellowship Scheme (Matthews Fellowship, 2015-18). The student (Khouri) and staff (Oberhollenzer and Matthews) partnering to co-create the SaP CoP involved a range of knowledgeable stakeholders, within and beyond UQ, involved in the co-design process through iterative communication cycles to finalise the purpose, aims, values, activities, and membership of the UQ SaP CoP