A Partnership Outcome Spaces framework for purposeful student–staff partnerships

Abstract

The benefits of student–staff partnerships are widely reported in the Students-as-Partners literature. It is envisaged that partnership initiatives can have a transformative effect on institutional cultures, however, how this transformation might be achieved is less clear. Building on transdisciplinary and systems change perspectives, we propose a Partnership Outcome Spaces framework to develop an understanding of how student–staff partnerships might influence institutional cultures. We identify four outcome spaces: situation, knowledge, learning and relationships, with reflexivity and a structured partnership methodology as key enablers of these outcomes. This framework is applied to a case study examining a Student Services Hub project in one Australian university. Through this analysis, the importance of less tangible and relational outcomes arising from student–staff partnerships are highlighted. To influence institutional culture change, we encourage student–staff partnership practitioners to purposefully negotiate the various possible outcomes of their initiatives as an integral part of the partnership process.