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Pedagogical Partnerships

Pedagogical partnerships (also known as students as partners or SaP) — a relationship-centered approach to teaching and learning in which students and educators work together as collaborators to co-create curriculum, teaching activities, Assessment, open educational resources, and educational policies, rather than treating students as passive recipients of faculty-designed instruction. Rooted in values of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility (Cook-Sather et al., 2014), pedagogical partnership repositions students as co-creators of knowledge and educational innovation and challenges traditional top-down power dynamics in education. In the AI era, partnership has become a key counter-narrative to deficit views of students as AI cheaters or victims — positioning students as partners in co-designing AI policy, tools, and practice.

Questions to Consider

  • When you design a course, assignment, or policy, who typically makes the decisions — and whose perspective is left out? What would change if the people most affected by those decisions were genuine collaborators rather than recipients?
  • A common assumption is that students lack the expertise to contribute to teaching design. Yet partnership research argues students are experts in their own experience as learners. Where is the line between a student's legitimate experiential expertise and the faculty member's disciplinary expertise?
  • The word "partnership" can paper over real power differences — a student asked to "co-design" a course still depends on the instructor for grades and references. What conditions make a partnership genuine rather than performative?
  • In the age of generative AI, students are often framed as either cheaters or victims. How might reframing them as partners in designing AI use and policy change both the tools built and the conversations educators have with students?
  • Partnership can extend to whole classes, small groups, or individuals. Which form is most equitable, and what practical and resource constraints limit broader participation?
  • What does trust have to do with pedagogical partnership — and how might surveillance- or deficit-oriented responses to AI fracture the relationships partnership depends on?

Introduction

Pedagogical partnerships, also called students as partners (SaP), describe a spectrum of practices in which students collaborate with academic staff to shape teaching, learning, assessment, curriculum, and the broader student experience. The approach draws on the foundational guide by Cook-Sather, Bovill, and Felten (2014) and the higher-education framework of Healey, Flint, and Harrington (2014), which describe partnership as grounded in three core values: respect, reciprocity, and responsibility. Partnership is not about making students pedagogical experts, nor about faculty relinquishing disciplinary authority; rather, it recognizes the complementary roles each partner brings — faculty as disciplinary experts and intellectual guides, students as experts in their own experience as learners with diverse talents and interests.

Pedagogical partnership challenges the entrenched assumption that students cannot be trusted to collaborate on teaching and learning, and it actively disrupts traditional faculty-centered hierarchies. It overlaps conceptually with Collaborative Learning, learner agency, and Student Engagement, but is distinct in centering students in the design of education itself — curriculum, assessment, teaching activities, open educational resources, and policy — rather than merely as active participants within a pre-designed course.

In the generative AI era, pedagogical partnership has taken on new urgency. As AI amplifies deficit narratives that frame students as either cheaters or victims (see AI Misuse Learning Harm and Framing AI Use For Students), partnership offers a counter-narrative: rather than policing students or assuming misuse, educators and institutions can engage students as co-designers of AI policy, tools, and practice. This is reflected across the knowledge base's research — from students co-designing course AI policies to co-creating custom AI tools and co-constructing assessment criteria.

Forms and scope of partnership

Partnership can take many forms and operate at multiple scales, each with distinct affordances and constraints:

  • Whole-class partnership (co-creation in the classroom): All students in a course collaborate with faculty on course structure, content, goals, and policies. Whole-class approaches may be the most equitable form of partnership because they allow broad participation and benefit, though they require substantial "high-touch" personnel resources to support increased student decision-making (Bovill, 2020).
  • Individual or small-group partnership: A small number of student partners work with staff on a specific project — for example, co-designing Assessment criteria, evaluating AI tools, or developing curriculum. These are well-suited to dialogic, in-depth collaboration.
  • Project- or program-based partnership: Students partner on a bounded initiative, such as co-designing a course AI policy, building a custom AI tool, or developing an algorithmic-literacy program.
  • Partnership in Curriculum Design and Learning Design: Students contribute to shaping what and how learning happens, from individual activities to entire programs.

Across these forms, partnership is a process and a relationship, not just an activity. The outcomes are often co-created and not fully defined in advance, which requires staff to let go of control and accept the risks of the unknown — values that run counter to the hidden rules of much of higher education.

Pedagogical partnership and AI in education

The intersection of pedagogical partnership and AI is one of the fastest-growing strands of the knowledge base. Key themes:

  • Students as co-designers of AI policy. Rather than institutions imposing AI rules on students, partnership positions students as co-creators of course- and institution-level AI policy. For example, a guided-inquiry activity in which students co-designed a Generative AI course policy surfaced student priorities around training, standardized disclosure, institutional support, and involvement in decision-making (Guided Inquiry GenAI Course Policy 2026).
  • Students as co-creators of AI tools. In students-as-partners frameworks, students have co-designed and refined custom AI chatbots aligned with pedagogical goals — an approach that extends the SaP paradigm to include AI tools themselves and positions student voice as central to responsible AI innovation (Lo Co Creating Custom Gpts Sap 2026).
  • Co-creation in assessment and AI. Student-staff partnerships have co-evaluated AI-generated output in coursework assessments and co-designed evaluation criteria, improving understanding of AI's benefits and limits and supporting Self Regulated Learning (Williams Ingle Assessment Co Creation AI 2025).
  • Partnership to preserve pedagogical trust. In the face of AI-driven uncertainty and "AI shame," partnership practices that nurture pedagogical trust — a confident, reciprocal learning relationship open to uncertainty and co-navigated through dialogue — offer a way to sustain the relational core of education (Matthews Five Guiding Principles AI Sap Trust 2025).
  • Youth as co-designers of AI systems. Participatory design approaches engage historically minoritized students as partners in designing the AI systems that will affect their classrooms, surfacing students' values and ethical commitments (Chang Co Designing AI Youth Relational Privacy 2025).
  • Students' lived realities as a design input. Frameworks like entangled pedagogy illuminate the complex, "messy" realities students navigate with AI, arguing that policy and guidance should be co-designed with students in light of their lived experiences rather than imposed from above (Fawns Entangled Pedagogy GenAI Students 2026).

These strands share a core claim: that the people who will live with AI in education — students — must be meaningfully engaged in shaping it, or the resulting tools, policies, and practices risk being untrustworthy, inequitable, or ineffective.

Pedagogical partnership is related to but distinct from several neighboring concepts:

  • Learner agency and Self Directed Learning: Partnership supports learner agency by giving students a voice in what and how they learn, and it overlaps with self-directed learning. However, partnership is fundamentally relational — agency and direction emerge through the instructor–student relationship rather than in isolation. Some frameworks conceptualize this as "shared agency" that exists in the relationship between student and instructor, not within either party alone.
  • Collaborative Learning: Both involve working together, but collaborative learning typically refers to students learning with each other within a designed activity, whereas pedagogical partnership centers students and staff collaborating on the design of education itself.
  • Student Engagement: Partnership is a deep form of engagement, but engagement describes a student's involvement in learning while partnership describes a changed power relationship in which students share responsibility for shaping that learning.
  • Teacher Role: Partnership redefines the teacher's role from sole authority and gatekeeper of knowledge to co-designer and intellectual guide, without diminishing faculty expertise.
  • Assessment and Authentic Assessment: Co-designing assessment — from evaluation criteria to rubrics to whole assessment formats — is a central arena of partnership, and AI has amplified both the need for and the difficulty of genuine co-design in assessment.
  • Educational Policy AI and Governance: Partnership extends into policy and governance, positioning students as co-creators of AI policy rather than passive subjects of it.
  • Equity In AI Education and Inclusive Learning: Partnership is argued to be a more equitable form of educational participation, centering voices — especially those of historically minoritized or marginalized students — that are often excluded from educational decision-making.

Key research themes

  • Whether and how partnership improves learning outcomes, Student Engagement, Motivation, and a sense of belonging.
  • The relational conditions — trust, psychological safety, dialogue, shared responsibility — required to bring partnerships about and sustain them.
  • How AI both enables and complicates partnership: as students co-design AI tools and policies, and as deficit narratives around AI threaten the trust partnership depends on.
  • Equity in partnership: which students get to participate, whose voices are centered, and how whole-class vs. selective forms distribute benefit.
  • The resource and institutional constraints on partnership, including the time-intensive nature of genuine co-design.
  • How partnership relates to decolonizing, critical, and critical pedagogies that challenge traditional hierarchies and center multiple ways of knowing.

Practical implications

For educators and institutions seeking to adopt pedagogical partnership, the knowledge base's research suggests:

  1. Start small and iterate. Begin with a bounded project — a pilot with a limited number of participants — and honor participant effort with recognition (employment, credit, certificates, publication).
  2. Build on existing infrastructure. Faculty development programs, student employment relationships, and cross-campus partnerships provide foundations for adapting partnership practice.
  3. Lead with relationship and trust. Partnership works when trust, psychological safety, dialogue, and shared responsibility are deliberately cultivated — not assumed.
  4. In the AI era, invite students in rather than policing them. Co-designing AI policy, tools, and assessment with students is both more equitable and more effective than deficit-based responses.
  5. Consider equity of participation. Whole-class partnership offers the broadest participation; selective programs must attend to which students are invited and included.

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