Introduction

Higher education is traditionally structured such that faculty members and students each approach the classroom with and from their own, differing perspectives. While a faculty member may convey her view of a course through the syllabus and gather student feedback in various forums, the different angles of vision faculty and students bring to the shared space of the classroom are rarely analyzed in terms of how they inform one another. Given the content-driven nature of most courses and the traditional division of roles and responsibilities between teachers and learners (Glasser and Powers 2011; King and Felten 2012), it is rare, outside of education departments, for faculty and students to engage as equal partners in substantive let alone sustained dialogue about the processes of teaching and learning in which they both participate. The result for faculty can be to reinforce what Shulman (2004) has called “pedagogical solitude” (p. 140): This is the norm according to which faculty tend to plan, teach, and assess our work alone. The result for students can be a sense of apathy and alienation (Mann 2001): They have a feeling of being disengaged from their studies and “academically adrift” (Arum and Roska 2010).

The goal of the study upon which this paper reports is to explore what happens when faculty and students engage with one another in structured dialogue about teaching and learning outside of the regular spaces within which they interact. An action research approach was taken to this study in order both to analyze the experiences of participants in a program that aims to complicate traditional hierarchical relationships between students and faculty and to facilitate further change to improve teaching and learning. Action research is a process of collective, collaborative, self-reflective, critical inquiry (McCutcheon and Jung 1990). The goal is to explore “practical questions evolving from everyday educational work” (Altrichter et al. 1993, p. 5) through integrating action and research to challenge the routines of the status quo (Somekh and Zeichner 2009). The case study presented of a student-faculty partnership program offers insight not only into the ways in which faculty and students can collaborate in analyses of pedagogical practice and learn from one another but also into how such dialogic engagement can become a part of both students’ and teachers’ practice.

Theoretical underpinnings

Both this study and the program that is its focus draw on several arenas of theory and practice. The first is student voice. The basic premises of student voice work are that young people have unique perspectives on learning, teaching, and schooling, that their insights warrant not only the attention but also the responses of adults, and that they should be afforded opportunities to actively shape their education (Cook-Sather 2006b). There was a burgeoning of interest in student voice in K-12 contexts beginning in the early to mid-1990s, when several authors pointed out that “the voices of children…have been missing from the whole discussion” of education and educational reform (Kozol 1991, p. 5; Levin 2000; Fullan 1991; Rudduck et al. 1996).

A second wave of student voice work arose in the early 2000s (Cook-Sather 2002; Fielding 2001; Pekrul and Levin 2005; Rudduck and Flutter 2004), and since then analyses of and guidelines for how to pursue such work have proliferated (Cook-Sather 2009b; Fielding 2006; MacBeath et al. 2003; Rudduck 2007; Rudduck and McIntyre 2007; Thiessen and Cook-Sather 2007). Advocates of student voice have warned, however, against the assumption that there is a “single, uniform and invariable experience” (Rubin and Silva 2003, p. 2) among students and caution that genuine student voice can be undermined by tokenism, manipulation, and practices not matching rhetoric in student-voice projects (Atweh and Burton 1995; Fielding 2004a, b; Holdsworth 2000; Lodge 2005; Lundy 2007).

The second arena of theory and practice upon which this study draws includes efforts to bring student voice into higher education. These efforts encompass faculty development projects focused on classroom practice and research projects focused on teaching and learning. The partnership model according to which these efforts unfold values both faculty and student perspectives in the work of conceptualizing and reconceptualizing educational opportunities in higher education. Some faculty development programs partner students and faculty in explorations that aim to affirm as well as revise teaching approaches while faculty are teaching their courses (Bovill et al. 2011; Cook-Sather et al. 2014; Cook-Sather 2008, 2009, 2011b, 2013; Cox 2001; Cox and Sorenson 1999; Sorenson 2001). Others focus on teams of students, faculty, and professional development staff collaborating to design or redesign courses (Bovill 2013; Delpish et al. 2010; Mihans et al. 2008).

Recent work in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has similarly begun to recognize students “not as objects of inquiry…but as co-inquirers” (Hutchings et al. 2011, p. 79; see also Werder and Otis 2010; Werder et al. 2012). Such work is powerfully propelled by “a commitment to more shared responsibility for learning among students and teachers, a more democratic intellectual community, and more authentic co-inquiry” (Hutchings and Huber 2010, p. xii). The more radical of these efforts position students not only as partners in dialogue and development but also as change agents, a term that “explicitly supports a view of the student as ‘active collaborator’ and ‘co-producer,’ with the potential for transformation” (Dunne and Zandstra 2011 p. 4; see also Healey 2012; Neary 2010).

Student voice and student-faculty partnerships in higher education not only position students as legitimate informants (Feuerverger and Richards 2007) on the student experience and partners “work[ing] alongside teachers to mobilize their knowledge of school and become change agents of its culture and norms” (Fielding and Bragg 2003, p. 4), they prompt and support reflective practice, the third arena of theory and practice upon which this study draws. Being reflective “encompasses both the capacity for critical inquiry and for self-reflection” (Larrivee 2000, p. 294). In the absence of opportunities to reflect on one’s “knowledge in action” (Schön 1987, p. 12), one runs the risk of “relying on routinized teaching” and “not developing as a teacher or as a person” (Reiman and Thies-Sprinthall 1998, p. 262; see also Hunt 2007; Klenowski et al. 2006; Zeichner and Liston 1987). At the college level, as at all levels, opportunities for reflection are not generally built into the “structure of teaching” (Elbaz 1987, p. 45), so these opportunities must be actively created.

The more traditional notion of reflective practice has the practitioner tacking between analysis of assumptions and feelings on the one hand and how those play out in practice on the other (Imel 1992). Working toward a more dynamic notion of reflection, Lesnick (2005) uses the image of a “mirror in motion” to argue for “an understanding of reflection that admits of ongoing movement, change, and interaction, so that ‘success’ in reflective practice is a matter of agility, mobility, flexibility, and, importantly, of the interdependence of one’s movements with those of others on and beyond the reflected scene” (p. 38). Integrating students into the “cycle of interpretation and action” (Rodgers 2002) that constitutes reflective practice provides participants with a unique forum within which to access and revise their assumptions, engage in reflective discourse, and take action in their work (Cook-Sather 2008, 2011a; Lawler 2003; Merriam et al. 2006; Mezirow 1991).

Context and research questions

This study is conducted within the context of Bryn Mawr College’s Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program. Bryn Mawr College is a selective liberal arts college for women in the northeastern United States with a population of 1,300 undergraduate women and 400 graduate students from 61 countries around the world. Supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the SaLT program pairs college faculty members with undergraduate students postioned as pedagogical consultants to those faculty. These pairs work in semester-long partnerships to analyze, affirm, and revise the pedagogical approaches employed in a particular course, and participants meet regularly not only in their pairs but in larger groups to discuss their work. The program is modeled on a project that invites high school students to serve as consultants to prospective secondary teachers (Cook-Sather 2002, 2006a, 2009b, 2010).

Participation in the program is voluntary, and faculty members choose to participate to orient themselves to the college if they are new, to focus on particular pedagogical issues, or simply to engage in dialogue about teaching and learning. Incoming tenure-track faculty members are given a course release if they choose to participate, and full-time, continuing faculty members earn stipends for their participation. Students apply for the position of consultant; the application process includes writing a statement about why they want to be a consultant and what would make them good at the role and securing two letters of recommendation, one from a faculty or staff member, and one from a student. This application process is designed not to exclude but rather to prompt students to reflect on their experiences and recognize the ways in which they have expertise and insights to bring to conversations about teaching and learning.

Each consultant is paid standard student hourly wages to fulfill the following responsibilities. To initiate the partnership, the consultant meets with her faculty partner to establish why each is involved and what hopes both have for the collaboration and to plan the semester’s focus and meetings. Then, the consultant visits one class session of her faculty partner’s course each week and takes detailed observation notes on the pedagogical challenge(s) the faculty member identifies. The consultant might also survey or interview students in the class (if the faculty member wishes), either for mid-course feedback or at another point in the semester. Each week, the consultant meets with her faculty partner to discuss observation notes and other feedback and implications. She also participates in weekly meetings with other student consultants and with the coordinator of the program and visits five times over the course of the semester one or more of the weekly seminars that support faculty participants.

For several reasons, consultants are not enrolled in the courses for which they consult. First, the imbalanced power dynamics, within which students are graded by faculty members, would preclude or at least complicate a student’s ability to offer honest feedback on pedagogical issues in the course. Second, having a single student in a course occupy a privileged position, with special access to faculty members and their pedagogical goals, would create inequity and possibly tensions among students enrolled in the course. Finally, unless it is a specific goal structured into the course, students cannot be both engaged learners focused on content and detached observers focused on pedagogical process.

The student-faculty partnerships are formed largely based on participants’ schedules and, where possible, taking into consideration personality and academic experience. Student consultants participate in an orientation and all participants are given detailed guidelines for participating in the program, but each partnership evolves in a different way depending on faculty need and interest and on consultant input. As with any partnership, some program partnerships make more progress than others in producing change in perspective on both sides, deepening reflection on teaching and learning, reinforcing good practice, and questioning old habits, but the role of the coordinator is to ensure that all partnerships are framed and supported as opportunities to learn. Hence, there can only be ‘failed’ partnerships if participants simply do not meet. Support is available to participants when there are tensions or miscommunications, and partners take up their work together in their own ways.

By bringing faculty out of pedagogical solitude and into partnership with students, the program invites faculty to reflect critically on their pedagogical practice in dialogue with those who spend their days in classrooms, and it positions students as co-producers rather than consumers of educational approaches and knowledge. The following pages detail findings from the ongoing study of what happens within these partnerships, guided by the following research questions: (1) What happens when faculty and students engage in structured dialogue with one another about teaching and learning outside of the regular spaces within which they interact? and (2) How can such dialogic engagement can become a part of both students’ and teachers’ practice?

Method

Because the everyday work of faculty development through the SaLT program repositions students and faculty as partners in exploring teaching and learning, the questions that emerge have individual and institutional implications. The action research approach taken here integrates the process of analyzing partnerships that explore pedagogical practice with the revision both of student-faculty relationships and of teaching and learning.

Participants

Between 2006 and the present, 178 faculty members and 104 student consultants have participated in a total of over 250 partnerships through the program. Faculty participants span disciplines, years of teaching experience, and rank. Student consultants are sophomores through seniors, major in a variety of subjects, range in experience with education (from those seeking state certification to teach at the secondary level to those who have never taken an education course), and claim various identities that reflect the diversity of the student body. Many of these students partner with faculty members for more than one semester.

Procedure

Participants in the program are invited to participate in the action research study that has been approved by Bryn Mawr College’s Institutional Review Board and that has been maintained since the advent of the program. Participation is entirely voluntary, and there are no repercussions for choosing not to participate. Faculty and students are asked to sign a consent form that makes explicit that the feedback and data gathered are for purposes of reflecting for themselves and for documenting and disseminating the work of the program.

Weekly meetings of student consultants and selected meetings with faculty participants are audiorecorded. The weekly meetings and the sessions of pedagogy seminars in which faculty and students gather together are semi-structured but open-ended, and so these conversations capture the ways in which faculty and students talk about pedagogical issues amongst themselves and across roles. In addition, mid- and end-of-semester feedback from those students and faculty members is collected. Mid- and end-of-semester feedback invite participants to discuss the benefits and challenges of working in partnership, to identify pedagogical and broader insights they have derived through their participation, and to offer advice to future participants. Finally, follow-up interviews are recorded. The follow-up interviews, generally conducted in small groups, sometimes invite participants to address an open-ended question such as, “What have you carried forward from your partnership work into your practice?” Other times they ask participants to address more structured questions, for instance, by completing sentences such as, “I am more comfortable…,” “I am less comfortable…”, “I work with students….”

Data analysis

The data have been transcribed and coded using constant comparison/grounded theory (Creswell 2006; Glaser and Strauss 1967) in order to determine themes and trends in the experiences and perspectives of participants. These themes were generated through the first step in the constant comparison method. Glaser and Strauss (1967) call this step identifying a phenomenon. This identification was followed by open coding: “the process of breaking down, examining, comparing, conceptualizing, and categorizing data” (Strauss and Corbin 1990, p. 61).

Results

The related concepts of gaining a different perspective, multiplying perspectives, and rethinking perspectives have emerged repeatedly in the data analysis. Both faculty and students describe how they multiply their perspectives in ways that have the potential to improve teaching and learning. The most basic shift they describe is from looking at the classroom from their own limited angle of vision, based on their role and as individuals, to perceiving the classroom from more angles of vision and analyzing the implications not only for everyone’s learning but also for the teaching that supports that learning. Participants in the program consistently highlight three basic ways in which their perspectives are multiplied and their teaching and learning experiences improved. Both faculty and student consultants describe:

  • gaining new insights produced at and by the intersections of their experiences and angles of vision;

  • developing greater self-awareness and deeper understanding of others’ experiences and perspectives through engaging in sustained dialogue across experiences and angles of vision; and

  • embracing more engaged and collaborative approaches to teaching and learning.

Each of the following sections explicates these outcomes and supports them with quotations from faculty members and student consultants. Any quotation included represents a perspective conveyed by the majority of participants.

Gaining new insights at the intersections of faculty and student perspectives

Participant feedback and reflections reveal that when faculty members and student consultants partner in explorations of pedagogical issues, they bring together their (literally) different perspectives on the classroom and gain (figuratively) insights into teaching and learning within that classroom.

Faculty members gaining insights

Faculty members speak repeatedly about how the student consultant is able to observe what, as one faculty member put it, “I cannot from my vantage point.” This professor meant this “not only figuratively but also literally, as [the consultant] has a line of sight into the space of the classroom which I do not have from where I stand.” This “line of sight” opens up a view that encompasses more than what faculty members previously perceived; it changes what they see. As another faculty member explained:

There are some quiet students in my class—this was really powerful for me—one student was putting up her hand very slightly. I was literally blind to her. [My consultant] pointed it out. Then she [the student] did it next class, and I saw her, and she talked three times. When [the consultant] told me, I was stunned—I had just missed her. And when she did talk, she said very thoughtful things.

The literal lines of sight opened up for faculty have a parallel in the insights gained when those faculty have access to student perspectives. Just as consultants point out students in the classroom space who were invisible to or unnoticed by faculty, they surface experiences that were also not discerned by faculty. As another faculty member reflected:

There were a number of times when [the student consultant] was bringing positive observations that I wouldn’t necessarily have known—that so-and-so was feeling particularly interested and engaged by a topic or a teaching approach that I wouldn’t have necessarily thought about. I often felt like, ‘Oh, I didn’t see it that way, and now I do; now I have that perspective.’

Student consultants gaining insights

Like their faculty partners, student consultants repeatedly comment on the importance of gaining a different perspective through their positions as consultants. As students but not those enrolled in the course under study, consultants have a perspective that yields new insights into teaching and learning:

You really don’t understand the way you learn and how others learn until you can step back from it and are not in the class with the main aim to learn the material of the class but more to understand what is going on in the class and what is going through people’s minds as they relate with that material.

Here, like the faculty member who gains a new line of sight into the classroom and the students’ experiences, this student consultant “steps back” and, in both literal and figurative ways, re-vises what she sees in the classroom. Another student consultant elaborated on this experience:

My involvement [as a student consultant] has allowed me to view the experience of learning when I am not engaged in that role [of learner] myself. If I don’t understand something that the professor is explaining, I try to figure out why I don’t understand it, as opposed to struggling with how to write the course content in my notebook. This feeling provides a clear space for me to think about how a professor teaches and I learn, as opposed to what is being taught and learned.

The new angles of vision that consultants gain on classroom experience raise their awareness of the learning process, offering a new perspective on how learning works and how learners are—or are not—invited to engage.

Through sharing what they see, student consultants and faculty members have the opportunity to explore their own and each others’ perspectives. This exploration leads to deeper awareness.

Developing deeper self-awareness and understanding of others’ experiences

The deeper self-awareness and understanding of others’ experiences that result from bringing perspectives into dialogue are two manifestations of the same more focused and thoughtful analysis. In other words, prompted by the insights they gain, faculty and students both look more deeply within themselves and pay more careful attention to others.

Faculty members deepening awareness

Faculty members consistently describe experiences of deepened self-awareness and awareness of students that lead to richer understandings of their own and students’ experiences and perspectives. About her deepened self-awareness, one faculty member explained: “[My student consultant’s] presence in the classroom made me more aware of how I presented myself in the class and of how I ‘read’ the students and my patterns of interaction with them.” Another wrote: “Just having her around has had a big effect on my self-awareness as a teacher and has prodded me to examine my own practice for the source of problems I thought were student problems.”

Faculty describe how their increased self-awareness is complemented by their deepened awareness of and attention to students’ experiences and perspectives. They talk about “gaining understanding and insight from a student’s perspective not just on what I do or do not do in the class, but also what her peers (fellow classmates) do and do not do to affect their learning experience.” This deeper understanding of the student experience and perspective informs how faculty think about practice. As another faculty member put it:

For the first time, I was able to get the sense of how others experienced the class. Her perspective gave her access to specific insights which I remained blind to: she alerted me to students’ confusion, affirmed and/or challenged my choices of activities, and helped me identify the pedagogical practices that worked, even for the most withdrawn students.

Student consultants deepening awareness

Student consultants also deepen their self-awareness and their understanding of faculty members’ experiences and perspectives. Each semester virtually every consultant offers some version of this statement: “My preparation for and my discussions with my faculty partner have made me more self-reflexive about my own experience and responsibilities as a student.” Consultants assert that they deepen their understanding of themselves and “understand so much better now how much my own perspective affects my interactions with learning and life.”

Consultants also develop a deeper understanding of the faculty experience and perspective. Each semester they offer comments like this on the power of “seeing behind the scenes”:

I have a much better understanding now of what a teacher’s life is like, the things they worry about, and how much most of them care about the students and how they are teaching. Perspective is such a powerful thing—and sometimes perspective is all that it takes.

Deepening self-awareness and developing a richer understanding of their own and each others’ perspectives is not only an answer to the question of what happens when faculty and students engage in dialogue about teaching and learning. It also informs the question of how dialogic engagement can become a part of both students’ and teachers’ practice.

Embracing more engaged and collaborative approaches to teaching and learning

Faculty and student participants indicate that gaining new perspectives and insights and deepening self-awareness and awareness of others contribute to their redefining the ways they approach classroom practice and participation.

Faculty members embracing more engaged and collaborative approaches

For faculty, a shift toward more engaged and collaborative approaches involves reconceptualizing students as partners in rather than recipients of education. One faculty member explained the change in his teaching after partnering with a consultant this way:

I work with students more as colleagues, more as people engaged in similar struggles to learn and grow. I have become even more convinced that students are experts in learning and essential partners in the task of creating and developing new courses and refining existing ones.

Another faculty member offered an explanation of the process of this shift to a more engaged and collaborative approach:

One unexpected side effect of working with the Student Consultant was a subtle change in attitude that I experienced. I have always strived to adjust course content and process to match student interests and needs, but I had always seen that as a process of me adjusting things for them. Mid-way through the semester of working with my Student Consultant, I realized that I was thinking about my class in a more collaborative way than I had before: I was thinking about building the course with the students, as partners.

Student consultants embracing more engaged and collaborative approaches

Student consultants also embrace more engaged and collaborative approaches. Here is a typical statement that encapsulates how consultants apply their newfound insights and capacities in relation to their understanding of themselves:

As a student I am more conscious of my own goals for taking a particular class and the big cohesive ideas that emanate from the individual lessons in the class. I constantly evaluate the level to which I engage with the material I learn. I may not necessarily change my strategy for engaging with ideas, but I realize that I have become much more conscious of my level of engagement. I realize that I have become more aware of my own learning patterns.

This level of awareness, coupled with the language and the capacity to communicate, position students to be more engaged and collaborative in their subsequent interactions with faculty:

One of the most important things I will take away from this experience is the new vocabulary and skill set I have with which to communicate with professors. Not only did I learn how to present criticism in a kind and hopefully a helpful way, but I can now think about how to bring my own professors into this conversation. Using the skill set I learned from [the SaLT program], I can consider how best to make improvements in my own classes, both for the students and for the professor. I now have a reference point with which to consider my professor’s point of view, and a sense of how I might make suggestions for improvement “hearable” to a professor outside of [the program].

The new vocabulary and skills help develop for student consultants the confidence that they can use to work more collaboratively with faculty in pursuit of learning. One student captures what virtually every consultant states: “Being a student consultant gives me an agency in the classroom that never ceases to surprise me. In my interactions with professors, I have a newfound ability to discuss openly where I’m struggling and what I think I need.” Or, as another student put it:

All of my classrooms feel like a partnership now, instead of the students versus the professor. I’ve started thinking about ways I can help make the discussions better for everyone in the class, including the professor, instead of just for me.

Discussion

The results of this study suggest that multiplying perspectives has the potential to make both faculty and students more aware, more responsive, and more confident in their engagement and, in turn, rethink the educational process as a more collaborative venture. Gaining new insights produced at and by the intersections of their experiences and angles of vision and drawing on these insights to deepen their own self-awareness and their attention to others’ experiences and perspectives can inspire both faculty and students to embrace more engaged and collaborative approaches to teaching and learning.

The new insights faculty members and student consultants gain at the intersections of their experiences and angles of vision give them a new “line of sight” in addition to the normative, single angle from which each views the classroom and what happens within it. Through accessing the student consultant perspective, and, through that, the perspectives of other students in the class, faculty members gain more of an inside-the-student-mind understanding of what students might be experiencing in the classroom: This is an understanding of the lived, felt experience, not simply the series of events or exchanges that take place. Likewise, when consultants access the faculty perspective, they develop insight into the work of teaching and rethink the work of learning.

Faculty members and student consultants draw on the insights they gain to develop greater self-awareness and a deeper understanding of others’ perspectives. This heightened self-awareness prompts faculty to examine more critically their practice and to discern what is working well and why and to identify areas that could be improved. Developing deeper self-awareness is a first step toward taking responsibility both for affirming and for changing one’s way of being in the classroom to maximize learning. Faculty members gain insight into the profoundly relational nature of teaching and learning and begin to think differently about their responsibility in that relationship. Getting a sense of “how others experienced the class,” as one faculty member put it, inspires faculty to reflect on what they are doing and could do to facilitate the most engaged learning experiences. Likewise, when students become more “self-reflexive,” as one consultant put it, they become better dialogue partners for faculty and more responsible students in their own classes. Understanding “what a teacher’s life is like” fosters empathy and connection, helping students move toward a more engaged and collaborative model of education.

Faculty members and student consultants use the same terms—“colleagues” and “partners”—to describe the more engaged and collaborative approaches they take as a result of working with one another in the SaLT program. Thinking of the educational process as a partnership, as a project undertaken by colleagues, not only brings together the different angles of vision faculty and students have on the classroom, it also brings faculty out of pedagogical solitude and, in one faculty member’s words, takes “my teaching to an amazing new level—both for my students, and for me personally.” Likewise, it prompts student consultants to develop a new sense of responsibility and commitment to a shared educational project; as one consultant put it: “Students have just as much responsibility as professors” for what happens in the classroom. The dialogic engagement that faculty members and students experience becomes a part of their practice, then, because they internalize the multiple perspectives they gain through partnership and redefine their practice as a shared project rather than separate responsibilities carried out in a shared space.

While multiplying perspectives is enlightening and empowering for all involved, there are also challenges. The two key challenges faculty members reiterate are that this work, while exhilarating and transformative, can also be vulnerable making and overwhelming. About the former experience, one faculty member explained that participation in the program was “wonderful and also scary at times to let someone else so deeply into my classroom and also, in certain ways, into my psyche.” Another faculty member highlighted the overwhelming quality:

It can be overwhelming, confusing and destabilizing. The deeper understanding that comes with years of teaching and learning in this remarkable program can also lead to a kind of paralysis—one is almost hyperaware of multiple angles of vision and one can and does sometimes get caught in a web of trying to see them all and think with all at once.

Student consultants also experience challenges as a result of this work. The two most common ones are the irreversible nature of the new awareness they develop and the realization that their newfound insights and capacities will not be welcome in all exchanges. One student captured the former experience this way:

Now I am constantly aware of how pedagogy works or fails, and I find myself constantly studying the teachers I admire—perhaps more than I study the material they teach. I think this sense of elevated consciousness alone will shape my thinking far into the future; now that I have been so exposed to this level of awareness, I really don’t think it would be possible for me to enter a classroom WITHOUT thinking that the way class is being taught (as opposed to simply what is being taught).

What this consultant highlights is that, once you take on this role, you cannot go back to ‘simply’ being a student.

Another consultant, who was co-author of an article on this program, captures the other challenge: of realizing her perspective will not always be welcome. She reflected:

[I]t can be difficult to have a realm (this program) where you feel incredibly empowered and your voice is valued, and [to have other realms] where it is not. It can create frustrations when you feel as though in certain arenas your voice is valued and invited, and in others you may just have to sit back and grit your teeth some because your feedback is not invited or may be clearly unwelcome. (Cook-Sather and Alter 2011, p. 48)

The SaLT program affords faculty members and student consultants time and space outside of the daily demands of being a faculty member or a student. It invites and structures dialogue across the different experiences and perspectives these two groups bring to questions of teaching and learning. With that time, space, and support, faculty and student partners can surface and analyze the different experiences and perspectives they bring without worrying about content coverage, grades, or any of the other standard foci for faculty-student interaction. The result is the development of receptivity to different perspectives and recognition of what they have to offer. As with all differences, when they are not carefully explored they can be divisive, causing frustration, irritation, and alienation. But when they are embraced, they can lead to the outcomes presented in previous sections of this paper: They can lead to a multiplying of perspectives that improves teaching and learning.

Both the benefits and the challenges highlighted here result from the contrast between the highly collaborative model the SaLT program embodies and the more traditional, hierarchical model that still holds sway in many higher education contexts. They result from multiplying perspectives rather than relying on the limited perspective faculty and students have in their respective positions as conventionally defined. Unless a more collaborative approach—partnerships, intersections of perspectives, and shared responsibility—becomes more of the norm in higher education, both faculty and students will experience frustration as well as excitement when they strive to work together on explorations of teaching and learning.

This potential for frustration points to the limitations of this study and indeed of this work. All participants’ experiences are based in a single context, and it is a context that accommodates, even if it does not fully embrace, this partnership model. Cross-context studies of multiplying perspectives might yield different challenges and possibilities, and we therefore need more work in this area across different kinds of institutions in higher education.

Conclusion

Perspective is, literally, the way things appear to the eye. It is also, more metaphorically, a point of view. In their most basic form, both the literal and the metaphorical definitions of perspective suggest a single position from which one perceives. It is, however, eyes—plural—that allow for literal perspective, and it is only in relation to other points of view that any single one has meaning. It is these complexities—intersections of the singular and the plural—and the richness of insight they yield that make ‘multiplying perspectives’ particularly appropriate for capturing the revisions that can result from faculty-student partnership in explorations of pedagogical practice.

As the discussion throughout this article suggests, bringing faculty and students into dialogue can yield a richer reciprocal understanding of each constituency’s perspectives and can support both groups in developing more engaged and collaborative approaches to teaching and learning. The access to, discussion of, and application to teaching and learning of the multiple perspectives that emerge from this work provide participants with new angles of vision, new insights that emerge from those angles, motivation to work collaboratively, and inspiration to take risks.

There are implications of this work for others interested in developing student-faculty partnerships to explore pedagogical practices and other educational issues. In considering how to bring faculty and student perspectives into dialogue, both initially and in a sustained way in other contexts, it is important to consider questions of structure, facilitation, and how to challenge underlying norms and assumptions that might impede this work. Power differentials between faculty and students and clear delineations of traditional roles (according to which faculty “know” and students “learn”) must be taken up and examined if genuine dialogue and collaboration are to unfold. Students have “to adjust to the new power dynamics” and faculty have “to trust student partners by sharing power with them, not exerting it over them” (Delpish et al. 2010, p. 98; see Cook-Sather et al. 2014, for an extended discussion of this point). Structured but flexible support and regular opportunities for individual reflection as well as conversation are essential in creating partnerships for students and faculty outside of course contexts.

Whether or not programs like SaLT exist or are developed to structure such partnership, we need to create more opportunities for all faculty and students to multiply perspectives. How might faculty create opportunities for themselves to gain insight into the experiences of students enrolled in their courses? How might students step back and gain perspective on their own learning? How might faculty and students find more opportunities for dialogue about what they learn from such multiplying of perspectives? Are there pre-existing structures that could be re-purposed to further these goals?

The intersection of single angles of vision and the plural points of view that can and do inform them have a powerful capacity to raise awareness of similarities and differences of experience and perception between faculty and students, to increase insight and empathy of each for the other, and to clarify and affirm commitments to the educational process. Increasing opportunities for such intersection increases opportunities for more informed pedagogical practice. Such efforts have the potential to deepen engagement and, more generally, communication and relationships among faculty and students, which, in turn, leads to further improvement in teaching and learning.