The ‘Partnership Identity’ in Higher Education: Moving From ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ to ‘We’ in Student-Staff Partnership

Student-staff partnerships in higher education re-frame the ways that students and staff work together as active collaborators in teaching and learning. Such a radical re-visioning of the relationships between students, staff, and the institutions within which they function is both potentially transformational and a significant challenge given the deeply entrenched identities, and attached norms, that form a part of institutional culture. Explicit examination of how identity formation and navigation influences, and is influenced by, student-staff partnership is an important but under-explored area in the partnership literature. Drawing on structured reflective narratives focused on our own partnership experiences, we employ collaborative autoethnographic methods to explore the nexus of partnership and identity through a social identity lens. Results highlight the need to move away from the labelling of dichotomous student/staff roles and identities in the context of partnership to a more nuanced conception that embraces the multiplicity of identity and diverse dimensions of meaning. We highlight the power of the normative conceptions that we attach to different identities, particularly where dissonance arises should those norms conflict. We discuss how this dissonance was particularly salient for us as we crossed the partnership threshold, only to find that the ethos underlying our new partnership identities contradicted the traditional hierarchical structure of the institutions within which we continued to function. Finally, we propose the existence of a ‘partnership identity’ as providing a space where partners might move away from distinctions between group identities of ‘us’ and them’ to a shared space of ‘we’ as partners and colleagues.