Change Institute
 

Change Institute

#STUDENTPARTNERSHIPS

THE BEGINNING:

The Emails

In March of 2016, I sent the first of many emails to Professors Terry Eyland and Heather McKeen-Edwards, and students Kelsy Boucher and Sarah Legge. In two short months, the five of us would travel to McMaster University, where Sarah would attend the Summer Institute on Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, and the rest of us would participate in the Change Institute. Briefly, the Change Institute was a three-day conference during which teams from around the world workshopped projects on students as partners in teaching and learning. As you can imagine, there was a variety of different projects. A team from Lingnan University in Hong Kong introduced a ‘student consultant’ initiative that provides faculty with pedagogical feedback, simultaneously negotiating the political climate surrounding student leadership in China. A team from Western University developed a course in which students and faculty work together to create the curriculum. Lastly, our team refined the Peer Academic Mentorship Program. The program offers a solution to the lack of academic advising at Bishop’s: student mentors are hired and trained to guide students through academic programs and processes. Stay tuned for my blog post about it – I use an awesome metaphor to explain! And while you’re at it, look for Sarah’s thrilling account of the Summer Institute!

Of course, before we had the experiences that inspired us to write those blog posts, we had to hammer out our travel plans. We did this in an email thread that spanned at least 30 emails, where nobody responded to the most recent message. It was my first insight as to what working with these people would be like. Kelsy and Sarah were always gung-ho, whereas Heather and especially Terry were more…particular, foreshadowing every interaction I would ever have with a professor in the future.

Eventually, however, we booked our Airbnb and – after several last minute changes of plan – decided that Terry and I would drive from Lennoxville and meet the rest of the team in Hamilton (they were already in the GTA). Now it’s an eight-hour drive from Lennoxville to Hamilton – longer if you hit Toronto rush hour, and longer still if you’ve only met your carpool buddy over email, and are therefore anticipating a lot of small talk and awkward silences. I brainstormed about ten different conversation topics, and blew through them all in half an hour.

THE MIDDLE: PART I

Meet and Greet

Luckily, Terry is a socially-competent fellow and kept the conversation afloat. He told me about his work in environmental economics, and how he was steering it in the direction of his work as a top level snowboard instructor and heli-ski guide. At this point, it dawned on me that this was the professor who my friends referred to as Cool Terry. It was a classic Bishop’s moment – of course I already knew about him; it’s virtually impossible to not know about someone at Bishop’s.

It was classic in another sense – here was a professor tying his favourite things together, allowing his passion to inform his work and scholarship. It was inspiring; I assume especially so for those in the ski and snowboard club – which, of course, Terry was a part of during his time as a student at BU!

The next seven hours flew by, as we made jokes about the number of provincial signs advertising laser tag venues in the GTA (upwards of ten) and discussed ditching the social portion of the conference to visit Niagara Falls with our team (spoiler alert: we did). We also made dinner plans with the rest of our team, using (at Terry’s insistence) “TripAdvisor, even when you aren’t really a tourist!”

On TripAdvisor’s advice, we all went out to an Indian place. It was Kelsy’s first time trying Indian food (“In Pembroke we just eat different kinds of meat and potatoes!”), which kept us going conversation-wise for most of the meal.

THE MIDDLE: PART II

Bonding

The following morning, we got off to a late start – too late for a Timmies breakfast run – so we arrived at the conference with food on the brain. As this was Kelsy and I’s first conference, we were pleasantly surprised to see all the different snack and lunch breaks on the schedule.

The schedule itself was even more fascinating, if you can believe it. It outlined a series of workshops to help teams develop their projects. Our team, for example, found the workshops on risk assessment and Gantt charting particularly helpful because they identified tangible next steps for the Peer Academic Mentorship Program.

Our favourite workshop, however, was the very first one. We were asked to visually depict our project on chart paper, and at Heather’s suggestion we drew a board-game style image. Like a simplified version of the Game of Life, there are two paths that students could take. The first represented the status quo at Bishop’s, wherein students receive all academic advice from their departmental chairs. Terry had the genius idea to use actual chairs to symbolize the department chairs, so we added an assortment of armchairs as well as a single three-legged stool to the bottom of our picture.

If we want to expand this into a metaphor, we could say that chairs, like department chairs, have a distinct role, and serve a distinct purpose. If you need to sit, you find a chair. Similarly, if you need to know about your program, graduation requirements etc., you go to your chair. But if you need to sleep, you don’t sit in a chair. And again, if you need to find an academic club, choose an elective, or determine if you are registered in the right number of credits to receive a scholarship, perhaps you don’t go the chair.

Here we see the relevance of the second path: the second path represented the Peer Academic Mentorship Program. Brightly coloured blocks indicated the different things that mentors could help students with: academic clubs and university social life, university policies, and general academic and academic specific issues. The last block had a ladder (à la Snakes and Ladders) that lead to the chairs, indicating that the mentors would work with and refer students to department chairs. It served as an acknowledgment that our program did not aim to usurp them – to steal their thrones, as it were. Rather, we would work together towards student comprehension of the academic system. Terry and Heather, department chairs themselves, offered insight into the nature of this collaboration, such as when mentors should refer students to chairs or the inverse: why chairs might refer students to mentors. We also drew in other partnerships we hoped to forge, with the likes of the records office (represented by a large record), student services (a broken heart with a Band-Aid) and the ombudsperson (a superhero).

Change Institute poster

This poster now hangs in my office, a reminder of the program’s guiding vision. In addition, it reminds me of what it took to build the program, and what it will take to sustain it.

The Peer Academic Mentorship Program was built on a series of partnerships between students and professors, and this was made very clear to me at the Change Institute. Ours was the only team in which students worked in a truly horizontal relationship with professors. I’m not one for vertical relationships, or hierarchies. I understand that the professor-student relationship may present as one, but we must keep in mind that the attitude of the student towards the professor is not and should not be one of submission. Professors do not and should not belittle students; they help them to grow. And students, rising to this challenge, challenge professors to become better teachers. In this relationship, professors and students have value, or ‘bring something to the table’. It is a partnership.

The Peer Academic Mentorship Program embodies this partnership in so many different ways. The program is centred on students helping students, demonstrating a horizontal approach to guidance. It is students helping students to bridge any gaps caused by perceived hierarchies so they can get the academic support they need. And lastly, it is students and professors working together in this endeavour. It is an ongoing endeavour, and will be as long as there are students in need of help. We must, therefore, maintain or even improve the student/professor partnerships on which it was built.

THE END

Legacy

I’ll leave you with one last anecdote before I bid you a fond farewell. After we finished the first workshop, the facilitators encouraged us to document our artwork on social media with the hashtag studentpartnerships. Like clockwork, people from around the room grabbed their phones and tablets to tweet and instagram (perhaps even linkedin?). Our team promptly adopted studentpartnerships as our name and preferred sign off. So without further ado,

#studentpartnershipsforever