Student-Faculty Partnerships for STEM Transformation

Student-faculty partnerships in the areas of pedagogy and course design have been shown to deepen learning, promote student engagement, and disrupt educational paradigms in which students are passive recipients of knowledge (Cook- Sather, Bovill, & Felten, 2014). In the context of STEM education, which has often failed to welcome diverse students by not accounting for their identities and experiences (Gerdon, 2022; Hernandez Brito, 2021; Perez, 2016; Reinholz et al., 2019; Weiler & Williamson, 2020), student-faculty partnerships have a particularly powerful potential to shift not only classroom practices, but department- and institution-wide exclusionary cultures of education. At Boise State University, a student partners program implemented through the Center for Teaching & Learning is one method in a multi-pronged approach to institutional change that was developed through an HHMI IE3 grant focused on empowering STEM instructors to use course-level data to empower inclusive teaching. The program leverages students as partners in pedagogy, creating connections between faculty and students that result in educational practices that meaningfully incorporate the perspectives of students. Built on the core principles of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility articulated by Cook- Sather, Bovill, & Felten (2014), Boise State's Student Partners program builds on the approach by adapting it to the model of a large, public, access-oriented university: a focus of the program is relaying the insights resulting from student partners' work in specific courses to larger audience through student-led programming. The presentation, which includes perspectives from current and former student and faculty partners, focuses on the ways that student partner program can shift cultures of education at the institutional level (creating opportunities for students to take an active role in changing courses and curricula) and center level (providing a model for CTLs to center & elevate the voices of the very students who are the primary beneficiaries of their work).