Abstract

This collaborative essay between undergraduate students and a faculty member illustrates the importance of partnerships between students and faculty when redesigning courses. We ground this partnering in Students as Partner (SaP) praxis. SaP reinvigorates the faculty and student relationship as one in which both students and faculty serve as active agents in curriculum development, redesign, and assessment. In this essay, we introduce our partnership, locally ground our partnership, and highlight how we redesigned a sustainable English Department capstone course to include a cumulative, integrative assignment. Our partnership was not designed to lead to a quantifiable direct output (i.e., a publication or even a redesigned class); instead, our goal was to build community, to support each other, to learn, to write for ourselves and each other. We conclude by offering brief qualitative data on the effectiveness of our redesign efforts and how our approach may work as a model for redesigning courses in different contexts/institutions.

Practitioner Notes

  1. Faculty and undergraduate can, and, when able, should partner together when redesigning courses.
  2. Faculty-student partnerships during course design can help ensure sustainable redesigned courses.
  3. Discipline-specific capstone courses should include a cumulative, integrative assignment.
  4. Faculty-student partnership should arise from and respond to local context.
  5. Those working within faculty-student partnerships should attend to issues of potential student labor exploitation.

Twitter Handle

@jmrifenburg

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