Elevating student voice and levelling traditional power hierarchies
Image by ScratchEd
Collaboration with students offers the potential for creating a more inclusive higher education environment, and open textbook development initiatives can be a vehicle for change.
DOT4D research team members Bianca Masuku, Glenda Cox and Michelle Willmers recently published a paper on ‘Elevating Student Voice and Levelling Traditional Power Hierarchies Through Open Textbook Co-Creation: What Do Students Say?’
The paper focuses on the experiences of UCT students as co-creators in open textbook initiatives. Drawing on interviews with student open textbook collaborators, the paper utilises Nancy Fraser’s social justice framework to explore students’ perspectives on injustices, challenges of collaboration and co-creation, and power dynamics in student–staff partnerships.
The study shows that students experience and navigate various injustices in their classroom contexts related to economic maldistribution, cultural misrecognition and political misrepresentation. It reveals a complex interrelationship between student voice, power dynamics in the classroom, and the power of student–staff partnerships to build confidence and flatten hierarchies in open textbook co-creation.
The student views presented in the paper provide powerful evidence of a range of benefits they experience when the traditional hierarchies between student and lecturer are levelled through collaborative open textbook development processes. Results indicate that co-creation activities enabled them to have a voice through the power of publication and own their academic journeys.