Blog post
Students experience empowerment and empathy through pedagogical partnership
Student empowerment can take many forms. Some, such as new and , can feel threatening to faculty and higher education communities. Others offer a counternarrative to the divisiveness that is intensifying on some college and university campuses. and others’ research has found that foster positive forms of empowerment and greater empathy. By supporting sustained dialogue between students and faculty, they offer an especially promising way to ‘’.
‘Pedagogical partnerships foster positive forms of empowerment and greater empathy.’
We have worked together in one of the longest standing pedagogical partnership programs in the United States, – Alison as director and Yeidaly as a student consultant and a researcher. This program supports pedagogical partnerships through which an undergraduate student not enrolled in the focal course with the faculty member teaching that course. Through weekly classroom observations and meetings, student consultants explore with their faculty partners pedagogical and curricular issues, such as .
Over the last decade or so, has become an institutional commitment in , , and the , is beginning to evolve in as well, and is spreading into the world of . The and of such work are alongside the and . A consistent outcome reported by the vast majority of student partners, however, is a sense of empowerment within and beyond the pedagogical partnership itself. As one student consultant in the SaLT program explained,
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‘It definitely gave me the strength to find a voice in the classroom. I was always aware that I had a different perspective from my peers just because of where I was coming from and my first language and my culture being different. But the student consultant role, because it gave me the space in the work, it gave me the language to talk in class about my experiences more than I would have had I not been in the program, for sure. It empowered me to talk to professors taking all those factors into account—where I come from—having that be part of the conversation.’ |
Through having supported opportunities to engage in dialogue with faculty about issues of teaching and learning, and through having their voices and perspectives heard and valued, students develop language, confidence and commitment that inspires them to continue in such dialogue.
Some might worry that if students ‘find a voice in the classroom’ and feel ‘empowered… to talk to professors’, they might become overly aggressive and demanding. The fear of being perceived in this way is one of the reasons . Their place in the classroom is often a dichotomy: they are either perceived as the person who is angry and demanding a place in the conversation, or they are quiet and anxious, ready to speak but feeling that no one will listen. This is particularly prevalent in the context of predominantly white institutions.
We have found that pedagogical partnership provides a context within which to address such dichotomies. Rather than the enmity that some forms of activism and can exacerbate, partnership fosters, alongside a productive sense of empowerment in students, empathy for faculty members and their efforts to . In the words of another student consultant in SaLT,
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Ìý‘[Participating in pedagogical partnership] made me a lot more compassionate towards my professors, more empathetic, because I saw how hard my faculty partners were working, it made me a lot less likely to disparage my own teachers and less willing to tolerate that from other people.’ |
In the feedback they offer, like the above, and in the they publish about their experiences, students convey the ways in which pedagogical partnership affords them not only the space but also the right to care.
To our minds, the combination of feeling a greater sense of confidence and capacity and feeling more caring toward others holds promise for more engaged and empowering educational experiences for everyone. It holds particular promise in these times of heightened tension between faculty and students on campuses, when what we need is more dialogue across differences, not less.