Engagement through Partnership: Students as Partners in Teaching & Learning: Final Report 2023–2025

Student-staff partnership (SSP) is located within traditions of democratic education and critical pedagogy, foregrounding reciprocity, agency and shared responsibility. It is a values-based way of working enacted through everyday practices that redistributes power in knowledge production and educational decision-making. Across settings, reported SSP benefits include enhanced belonging, agency, confidence and metacognitive awareness and motivation for students and staff, and stronger enhancement cultures and coherent quality cycles at an institutional level. Limitations in this evidentiary base, however, include smallscale, cross-sectional case studies with selfselecting participants and limited attention to counterfactuals or longer-term outcomes. Systematic accounts of tensions, partial realisations and unintended consequences of SSP are emerging in the literature.

What we did
We used a realist inquiry framework to support programme theory development about how student–staff partnership practices operate in different institutional contexts. We first conducted a realist review to develop midrange (explanatory) theory about how SSP in higher education works, for whom, in what ways and under what conditions it could become a sustainable way of being and working together. We next conducted a realist-informed survey across four schools in UCD to test the plausibility and contextual variation of these theories. We then conducted a realist evaluation workshop with academic and professional staff and students in UCD to adjudicate, refine and consolidate final UCD-specific programme theories.

What we found
Explanatory evidence across the published literature supported five mid-range programme theories of SSP. These addressed how Inclusive Institutional Cultures Enable Partnership; Cross-Boundary Collaboration Strengthens Learning and Practice; Curriculum Co-Design Builds Shared Ownership; Reflective Dialogue Sustains Partnership Practice; and BoundarySpanning Practices Enable Collaboration and Change. Evaluation in the local context of UCD directed analytical attention towards three theories with the greatest contextual resonance and explanatory coherence. These were further refined using team-based adjudication and individual written feedback derived during the workshop. Results suggest that in the context of UCD