Treating students as partners - Is it so simple? An empirical investigation of student partnership in a business education context

Abstract

The challenges assigned by the ‘student as partner’ movement have redrawn the ways how students and academic staff actively collaborate for the sake of successful teaching and learning. To gain competitive advantage, higher education institutions should understand what student partnership means in their context and decide how to talk about and act upon it. The primary purpose of this paper is to reveal how student partnership is interpreted by our students and lecturers who took part in an online brainstorming session and in an online application of the Q organizing technique to rank the concepts resulting from the previous brainstorming session. The results have been utilized to identify the main similarities and differences between students’ and lecturers’ interpretations. Neither students, nor lecturers could be treated as homogeneous groups, which also raises challenges to find the right mix of institutional answers to the conceptualization of student partnership.