The productive potential of pedagogical disagreements in classroom-focused student-staff partnerships

Student-staff pedagogical partnership is a rapidly expanding practice documented by a growing body of scholarship. That scholarship includes a wide range of empirical examples of what students and staff experience through pedagogical partnership, an emerging set of theoretical frameworks for analysing those experiences, and practical guidelines to support participant engagement in this work. Many publications have focused on identifying the possibilities and the challenges of pedagogical partnership and on developing premises and approaches that can create common ground on which to build such countercultural collaborative efforts. In this discussion, we provide an overview of that scholarship to situate our findings from a study focused on what happens when staff and student partners might find common ground for collaboration but nevertheless disagree about basic pedagogical questions. Using a narrative analysis approach, we examined qualitative data gathered through an ethics-board-approved survey that asked about pedagogical disagreements in classroom-focused pedagogical partnership as experienced by students and academic staff at 16 colleges and universities across Canada, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our findings suggest that when pedagogical disagreements arise, they can help clarify perspectives and pedagogical commitments, and when they do not arise, it may be due to the receptive and responsive stance students and staff take within their partnerships. These findings are important for the ways they normalise disagreement as a productive aspect of pedagogical partnership. They also point to opportunities for further research into how all staff and students might consider managing differences of perspective and disagreements.