Promoting Equity and Justice Through Pedagogical Partnership

Faculty and staff in higher education are looking for ways to address the deep inequity and systemic racism that pervade our colleges and universities. Pedagogical partnership can be a powerful tool to enhance equity, inclusion, and justice in our classrooms and curricula. These partnerships create opportunities for students from underrepresented and equity-seeking groups to collaborate with faculty and staff to revise and reinvent pedagogies, assessments, and course designs, positioning equity and justice as core educational aims. When students have a seat at the table, previously unheard voices are amplified, and diversity and difference introduce essential perspectives that are too often overlooked.

In particular, the book contributes to the literature on pedagogical partnership and equity in education by integrating theory, synthesizing research, and providing concrete examples of the ways partnership can contribute to more equitable educational systems. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that partnership can only realize its full potential to redress harms and promote equity and justice when thoughtfully enacted. This book is a resource that will inspire and challenge a wide variety of higher education faculty and staff and contribute to advancing both practice and research on the potential of student-faculty pedagogical partnerships.

Presenting a conceptual framework for understanding the various epistemological, affective, and ontological harms that face students from equity-seeking groups in postsecondary education, Promoting Equity and Justice Through Pedagogical Partnership applies this conceptual framework to current literature in partnerships, highlighting the promise of partnership as the way to redress these harms.

The authors ground both the conceptual framework and the literature review by offering two case studies of pedagogical partnership in practice. They then explore the complexities raised by their framework, including the conditions under which partnerships themselves may risk reproducing epistemic, affective, or ontological harms. Applying the framework in this way allows them to propose strategies that make it more likely for these mediations to be successful.

Finally, the authors focus on the future of pedagogical partnership and share their perspectives on new directions for inquiry and practice. After summarizing the overarching themes developed throughout the book, the authors leave the reader with a set of questions and recommendations for further inquiry and discussion.

Visit the Promoting Equity and Justice through Pedagogical Partnership Companion page, hosted by the Center for Engaged Learning.

Alise de Bie is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation, and Excellence in Teaching at McMaster University. Working across disciplines, Alise’s teaching and research has primarily contributed to Mad(ness) Studies and Critical Disability Studies. Their work can be found in journals such as Disability & Society, Teaching in Higher Education, Social Work Education, Academic Psychiatry, and Medical Humanities.

Elizabeth Marquis is an associate professor in the Arts and Science program and the School of the Arts at McMaster University. Beth’s teaching and learning research focuses primarily on student-faculty partnership, the intersections between teaching and learning and questions of equity and justice, and film and media texts as public pedagogy. She has published widely on these and other topics (often in partnership with students), and her work can be found in journals such as Pedagogy, Culture, and Society, Teaching in Higher Education, and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. From 2015–2020, Beth served as associate director (Research) at McMaster’s Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation, and Excellence in Teaching, where she codeveloped and oversaw McMaster’s StudentPartners Program (SPP), and served as a founding coeditor of the International Journal for Students as Partners.

Alison Cook-Sather is Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor of Education at Bryn Mawr College and director of the Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges. Alison has developed internationally recognized programs that position students as pedagogical consultants to prospective secondary teachers and to practicing college faculty members. She is founding editor of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education and founding coeditor of International Journal for Students as Partners.

Leslie Patricia Luqueño is a doctoral student at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, where she specializes in the sociology of education. Leslie’s current research focuses on the experiences of second-generation Latinx immigrant college students and the unique pockets of familial and experiential knowledge they carry that help them survive and thrive within higher education. She is the coauthor of the book chapter “ValuingKnowledge(s) and Cultivating Confidence: Contributions of Student–Faculty Pedagogical Partnerships to Epistemic Justice” and her undergraduate work has earned international accolades in legal studies and sociology from The Global Undergraduate Awards.