Abstract
Much of the student-staff partnership literature calls for increased collaboration and power sharing among staff and students. Less common are accounts by student partners themselves that take up the challenge of what partnership and power feel like as universities embrace their neoliberal trajectory - and - purport to do so on behalf of students themselves. Especially acute is the conundrum of how partnership initiatives can, and do, reproduce the very power dynamics they set out to transform. We are a group of students and staff working in curriculum partnership together at Western Sydney University. The context of our work together is the 21C project, a university-wide strategy to transform curriculum, teaching, and learning, drawing on ‘partnership pedagogy’. In this paper, we engage in a process of reflexive inquiry to interrogate a new elective unit that many of us are involved in as advocates, co-creators, as students and staff learning together, and as evaluators, called We are the university: Students co-creating change (WATU). To highlight partnership’s intricate power plays, we offer a fictionalised account to reflect our multi-voiced experiences of being involved in WATU. We have come to understand power’s simultaneity in partnership as forms of power over, as permission-giving, as sharing (or partnership), and as the power to act (agency). The account is our story of partnership’s inevitable contradictions - a collaboration that teaches us about the challenges of working together while being cautious of partnership’s transformatory claims.

Abstract
The unit ‘We Are The University: students co-creating change’ (hereafter WATU) is a third year elective unit, available to any student in any degree at Western Sydney University. It was first presented at the National Students as Partners Roundtable in 2019. At that stage, we were at the beginning of the journey and excited: it was a unit being co-created with a paid group of student partners. In 2020, we presented on WATU at the Deakin Roundtable. It ran for the first time, online, with a small cohort of 4 students whose experience of student-staff partnership ranged from non-existent, to aspiring activist, to long-time student representative. This year, in 2021, WATU has morphed yet again to embed a 3-week Curiosity Pod (Students as Partners: co-creating change) aimed at giving any student a taster of staff-student partnership before later enrolling in the WATU unit itself. With two international students located off-shore and in different time zones due to COVID, once again we pivoted to being online together.

One of WATU’s unique features is the extent of its commitment to partnership pedagogy (Barrie & Pizzica, 2019). First, it has been co-created with the group of student curriculum partners working on the 21C project. They co-developed WATU’s aims, learning outcomes, crafted content, recommended an assessment strategy, made resources for students to engage with, are involved in the coaching, and WATU’s ongoing evaluation.Essentially, these students are WATU’s custodians. Second, WATU is also a partnership with our University’s Senate Education Committee who, in commissioning projects for students to complete as part of the assessment, then consider students’ projects as a standing item. This helps WATU stay connected with the University’s learning and teaching priorities. Third, and most pertinent for this presentation, WATU’s pedagogy is negotiated with the students enrolled in the unit. Where we can, we make decisions together that encourage institutional curiosity and questioning (Hunter, 2012), that disrupt and share power (Flint & Goddard, 2020) with the aim of cultivating student agency and responsibility.

The 6 of us in this presentation include 3 students who have completed WATU, 2 students currently enrolled in WATU, and the unit coordinator. As a team, we highlight four partnership paradoxes for further discussion. What happens for students when:

• WATU invites a pedagogy of partnership but the remainder of your units do not;

• Your WATU project is actually implemented and there are growing demands on your time to do more;

• WATU encourages students to think big but Senate Education Committee wants something do-able; and

• You have been a frustrated advocate for change and you realise mthrough WATU what it takes for change to happen in universities.

By highlighting these paradoxes, our goal is not to celebrate WATU uncritically. Rather it is to ask what happens when a partnership initiative provides an avenue for students to begin to believe that they ARE the University: what changes about their relationship to the University?