Striving toward Social Justice: Promoting Equity and Inclusion in Higher Education through Pedagogical Partnership

Dear Colleagues,

You are invited to submit an Abstract for consideration for inclusion in “Striving toward Social Justice: Promoting Equity and Inclusion in Higher Education through Pedagogical Partnership”, a Special Issue of Social Sciences. I have detailed guidelines for submission below.

Most efforts to promote equity and inclusion in higher education are guided by shared underlying premises, such as conceptualizing differences as resources, considering the particular strengths and needs students bring, and designing learning environments and approaches that support all students so that they can succeed and thrive. They are also necessarily shaped by context-specific challenges and possibilities, including cultural norms, political agendas, institutional values, and individual commitments. Pedagogical partnership, co-creation, and students-as-partners work—similar but not synonymous terms—hold promise, but not necessarily a guarantee, of promoting equity and inclusion in higher education (Cook-Sather, 2020; de Bie et al., 2021).

For this Special Issue, I am calling for articles and reviews focused on pedagogical partnership understood as “a collaborative, reciprocal process through which all participants have the opportunity to contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualization, decision making, implementation, investigation, or analysis” (Cook-Sather, Bovill, & Felten, 2014, pp. 6–7). Such partnership, as Gravett et al. (2019) note, is an ethos: “a dialogic and values-based approach to learning and teaching that has the potential to be transformative, developmental and fun” (p. 2586). Co-creation, as such work is also sometimes called, involves “shared decision-making, shared responsibility and negotiation of learning and teaching” (Bovill, 2020, p. 2), and it “disrupts the reductive teacher-student power hierarchy by granting agency and power to both sides to shape the classroom experience while also being cognisant of the different functional roles that each person inhabits” (student partner Jiayi Loh in Cook-Sather & Loh, 2023).

Abstracts should make clear and explicit how the full article or review will address the question of how pedagogical partnership can promote equity and inclusion in higher education, thereby striving toward social justice.

References

• Bovill, C. (2020). Co-creation in learning and teaching: The case for a whole-class approach in higher education. Higher Education, 79, 1023-1037. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00453-w.
• Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C., & Felten, P. (2014). Engaging Students as Partners in Learning & Teaching: A Guide for Faculty. Jossey-Bass.
• Cook-Sather, A., & Loh, J. (2023). Embracing student agentic engagement and enacting equity in higher education through co-creating learning and teaching. In T. Lowe (Ed). Advancing Student Engagement in Higher Education: Reflection, Critique and Challenge.
• de Bie, A., Marquis, E., Cook-Sather, A., & Luqueño, L. P. (2021). Promoting Equity and Justice through Pedagogical Partnership. Stylus Publishers. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/books/promoting-equity-and-justice-through-pedagogical-partnership.
• Gravett, K., Kinchin, I. M., & Winstone, N. E. (2019). ‘More than customers’: Conceptions of students as partners held by students, staff, and institutional leaders. Studies in Higher Education, 45(12), 2,574-2,587. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1623769. 

Dr. Alison Cook-Sather
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Social Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• student voice
• equity and justice in higher education
• social inclusion
• student–faculty pedagogical partnership