Students as partners (SaP) is becoming an increasingly common notion in higher education, but we continue to grapple with questions around how to best involve our students with the work we do as educators. Queries around responsibility, accountability and trust are raised when considering SaP.
Participatory action research is presented from an introductory chemistry module in chemical engineering, in which students were actively involved as partners at various stages of the research, redesign, and development of the module. The action research spanned a 2-year period, accommodating
2 iterations of the development of the module. The student partners actively participated in this process in 4 different ways: to set the research agenda (at the beginning), to create suitable formative assessment questions for their peers (ongoing), to manage other students in designing learning tools (as part of the second iteration), and to design and develop appropriate assessment (during the second iteration). Even though some initial structure was required in determining what the working relationship should look like, the student partners engaged constructively with the process and added considerable value to reshaping the module. The end result was a more student-focused module, where the student partners had challenged the status quo, used their experiences constructively, and truly empathised with their peers.