Empowerment and Partnership in Student Engagement Conference
Hosted by QQI, NStEP and StudentSurvey.ie, this conference explored interrelated concepts and priorities of student engagement, including empowering students and staff to collaborate and to co-create impact in enhancement, and embedding partnership in quality assurance and enhancement processes.
Themes and Recordings
Theme 1: Provocative Partnerships
Provocative Partnership: Interrogating Power in Student Engagement through Student-Staff Partnership
Dr Lucy Mercer-Mapstone (University of Sydney) and Ms Sophia Abbot (George Mason University, USA) engaged in a poetic dialogue to interrogate the intersecting ways in which power plays out in student staff partnership in higher education.
Are we negligent if some students don’t get to experience partnership?
Dr Catherine Bovill (University of Edinburgh) considered the potential implications of partnership for the student experience and institutional cultures. She used evidence to explore whether we could be thought to be negligent if only some students get to experience partnership in higher education.
Theme 2: Impact
Partnership with purpose - delivering real impact and breaking the cycle of patchwork fixing
Hillary Gyebi-Ababio (National Union of Students UK) challenged us to consider what real change, real impact might mean, and who it must serve. Her key message: change is happening and is needed, but the way it comes to life has to be done not only with new approaches but with a transformed view of purpose and scale of what change needs to look like and how it impacts people.
Theme 3: Embedding student partnerships in higher education
Embedding Student Partnerships in Higher Education
Gohar Hovhannisyan (European Students' Union) presented on the importance of embedding partnership in the quality assurance and enhancement processes of higher education institutions.
The relationship between student representation and student engagement
Mr Sjur Bergan discussed the relationship between student representation and student engagement. The presentation considered how policy makers can encourage student engagement by making good use of existing instruments as well as by making it possible for higher education to fulfil its four major purposes.
Additional recordings:
Opening address from Lorna Fitzpatrick, President of the Union of Students in Ireland (USI).
Closing remarks from Karena Maguire, Head of Stakeholder Engagement and Communications at QQI
The full recording of the conference includes the launch of the StudentSurvey.ie National Report 2020 and a discussion on impact in addition to the launch of the NStEP consultation on their discussion paper for a revised framework for student engagement.
