Faculty-Student Research Fellowships: A Call for Proposals

By: Jeffrey L. Bernstein

As many of you know, the Faculty Development Center has in recent years prioritized the creation and maintenance of partnerships between faculty and students. This work builds on a rich tradition in higher education, documented by Alison Cook-Sather and others, that shows that when students feel connected with their faculty members in a relationship-rich environment, they take greater agency in their learning, believe that they belong and matter at their schools, and are more likely to persist toward graduation. Faculty also benefit significantly from these partnerships. Many of us went into teaching because we value the opportunity to work with students; connections are very much a part of the DNA of Eastern Michigan University.

Almost 20 years ago, I was privileged to have a fellowship with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Palo Alto, working with my cohort on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning projects. Among my strongest memories of that fellowship was the general ethos - expressed by Pat Hutchings, Mary Huber, Lee Shulman, and others - that this work is done best when students are viewed as collaborators rather than as the subjects of study. We were encouraged, from day one, to think about how we would bring students into our respective projects; many of us sought out student partners for our research, working with them on brainstorming, implementation, and co-presenting and co-authoring scholarly papers. 

There is no doubt that faculty are the content experts in what we teach; however, we must give credence to the idea that students are experts at their learning and ought to be involved in conversations about teaching and learning. Over the last two years, the FDC has run numerous programs and learning communities focused on these partnerships, and on student voices, as part of our TaLT (Teaching and Learning Together) initiative. For example:

• Our first learning community from last year focused on opportunities for such partnerships at EMU, the barriers that confront the formation of these partnerships, and about how, working at an individual and systemic level, we can overcome these barriers and allow the university to reap the benefits of these partnerships;

• This year, we are hosting a learning community based around improving connections between clinical education students and their faculty. We are hosting an additional learning community on Collaborative Course (Re)Design, in which faculty-student pairs work together to redesign a course the faculty member is teaching.

• We also hosted our Flipping the Script student-led teaching conference in December to rave reviews. Flipping the Script featured plenaries and presentations from about 30 students, all offering a student perspective on teaching and learning in higher education. 

In my moments of optimism - and I believe most of you who know me would describe me as an optimistic, glass-half-full kind of person - I believe in the power of student faculty partnerships to reinvent higher education at Eastern Michigan University. I am inspired by my own example and the example of countless colleagues to whom I've spoken over the years. Faculty members, like myself, invariably can share stories about how a particular professor believed in them, gave them opportunities, and helped them envision a future for themselves in higher education that they had not previously seen. These kinds of partnerships have always been at the forefront of who we are at EMU. 

My vision for what teaching and learning can look like at EMU is one in which we offer opportunities to more of our students to engage in this kind of work, should they be interested. I would add to this that part of this work is encouraging our students to see the benefits of their being interested in these sorts of partnerships as well.

A robust literature tells us that pedagogical partnerships work in the ways I've mentioned above, and more. However, much of this work has been done at smaller, better-funded, and more selective schools. Less has been done to demonstrate their value at schools like EMU, where I would argue these partnerships can have an even greater impact. If the Faculty Development Center, and its partners in this vision, intend to paint a picture of these partnerships as being an important part of the future at Eastern Michigan University, we must build more intellectual capital to support this argument. That's where this grant application comes in. 

With profound thanks to GameAbove for their support of our Teaching and Learning Together (TaLT) initiatives to this point, we are pleased to now realize a long-term goal of the Center, offering Faculty-Student Research Fellowships. The full Call for Proposals is here. With this call, we hope to support faculty-student teams (each team must have at least one faculty member or lecturer as well as at least one student) that will study how these sorts of partnerships can proliferate on campus. In short, we are seeking partnerships to study partnerships!  (Pretty meta, huh?). We are interested in projects that might study how partnerships could enhance education in different places within the curriculum.  We would also love to see proposals that address challenges to partnerships and how they could be overcome. Other ideas are welcome;  if you want to help us understand partnerships, we want to consider supporting your work!

These proposals can be funded for up to $3000 for the 2024-25 academic year, with the possibility for additional funding the following year. The Call for Proposals offers more information on how the money could be spent. We anticipate these partnerships producing work that could be disseminated at conferences, in journals, and in other venues on- and off-campus. I would be more than pleased to speak with any of you about this call, and to help you craft a competitive application. 

Applications are due by Friday, April 12. Thanks for considering this call, and good luck in pulling together applications. We look forward to reading yours.