Empowering students via a Student as Partners project

Catherine: My name is Catherine Seaton. I teach Spanish on the Spanish program. At the moment I'm teaching intermediate Spanish. There were two things that I was hoping to achieve. The first one is the Student as Partners project has always been something that's interested me and I've been looking for ways to incorporate it into my teaching. I understand that UOW's strategic goals include empowering the student through Student as Partners projects. So I thought that that's my goal aligned with the university's goals and led me to introduce this current project into my teaching this year. The second reason is that usually we don't find out as educators what's working and what isn't during the course until the course is completed and we eventually get our student evaluation forms. And I was wondering to myself what if we could actually get feedback during the course in real time and perhaps we might be able to make accommodations, changes, alterations to the way the course is offered.

Catherine: I engaged the students in this project in the early stages by doing two things. The first one was having a general discussion with the students where they grouped up and worked together to brainstorm some ideas as to what this program could look like. Secondly, I came away with all the butcher papers, took them home, tried to distil them into something that I could then develop a Padlet questionnaire out of. I put the questionnaire up and through that I managed to get some very, very firm ideas as to what the majority of the students thought would work. I was then able to come back to the students and give them a proposed model based on their suggestions and what they thought would work best.

Student response to the introduction of the Compañeros program was interesting. At first there was a bit of hesitancy because I don't think anything like this has been run on the Spanish program before. So I think they were scratching their heads and wondering exactly what form this Compañeros de Camino would take. However, once we got working in groups with butcher paper and then later on as discussions with both the students and the actual compañeros themselves evolved, it seems as though the students really embraced the idea once they got a feeling for why I thought it was something that I could partner with the students in creating.

Catherine: The compañeros came to me with a variety of concerns, suggestions and ideas. And fortunately, most of them were ones that I was actually able to do something about. So some of them were very simple. They were asking perhaps for slightly different deadlines for certain tasks. They were asking for certain resources that hadn't been available for them to access so that they could prepare for assessments. They asked for those to be made available to them. They asked also for additional practice materials when it came to preparing for exams, things that I hadn't actually thought about. Most of those ideas were A, really good ones, and B, they were ones that were quite easy to implement.

I'd have to say that perhaps 85% of the ideas that they came to me with were ones that were not only easy to implement but also really good changes. The things that were difficult were things that related perhaps to structural aspects of assessments. For example, an online quiz that students do. And they were asking for changes to that quiz that affected the whole Spanish department were not decisions that I could make on my own and were ones that I wasn't actually able to deliver on.

Once I explained the reasons behind that and I'd made it clear to the compañeros in the first instance that I would make the changes where I could see fit. But there would be times when I wouldn't be able to do so and they would need to be open to understanding what those reasons were. And so I felt that I was able to explain to the students why that particular change wasn't possible and that seems to have been accepted.

Catherine: In terms of the achievements and what I set out to do and what my goals were for this pilot, I feel very much that I was able to achieve those. I did feel that the Compañeros de Camino project did empower the students. They did appear to have agency. They did feel as though they were creating community, which was one of the things that I was really, really interested in creating. And in terms of actually being able to institute changes during the course itself, for me that was a very powerful thing because it's not just a matter of making changes to the program so that the program runs better.

There was always the intention of enabling the students to also feel that they were being listened to and heard and that their views did matter and they weren't silly questions that were being asked. And for me that was a very powerful thing as well.

So I would say on both those counts that yes, it did achieve my goals. That was very beneficial. From the students' perspective, I think from the Compañeros' perspective rather, I think they felt that they were able to not only be responsible for creating a community, but they themselves seemed to say that they felt more integrated in this community of students, which was something that I actually hadn't anticipated. I didn't think of it from that perspective. And it was something that as a language educator, we're all about communication. And to actually hear that something we were doing actually had also this sort of not really side benefit because it's quite an important thing, but a way of creating a community of students who are experiencing many of the same challenges in learning a second language was very, very powerful.

Catherine: One of the main things that I learned during the course of this project was how important it was to engage the students as partners right at the beginning of the project. They were involved from the word go in the planning, the design, the implementation and even along the way as we worked our way through the way that this Compañeros de Camino project was to run.

I found that that was a very powerful way of demonstrating that the students actually were in a partnership with me and that's something that has definitely stayed with me and will be central to the way that I design the next round of Compañeros de Camino later this year.

My suggestions would be to start talking, talking to colleagues who may have had some experience in incorporating students as partners in their teaching, but also possibly discussing the topic with their students and the cohort perhaps that they might be teaching.

Students have a lot to say and they've got lots of contributions to make to these ideas and I think I would also seek some advice from learning and teaching who were very, very helpful with me. Especially in the early stages of this project in the design and they actually presented some thoughts and ideas that hadn't occurred to me.

And so I would definitely recommend discussing any of these ideas with learning and teaching.