In this Symposium, we challenge a Higher Education that is increasingly individualistic to rediscover the power of collaboration, to build spaces and places for partnership between service staff, faculty and students – within institutions, between institutions, and with wider stakeholders. Together we can construct the stories and practices of who we are, what we do, and what we and our students want to become – a space to come together to construct meaning and ourselves.
Following on from the publication of our Special Issue of the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice (JUTLP) on Collaboration in Higher Education, we have brought together the authors to speak about their research. The presentations build on practical experience, research data, personal and collective reflections, to outline how contributors have navigated tensions in Higher Education to create dialogic spaces of voice and hope.
The Journal presented case studies that are boundary crossing and life-affirming: collaborations with students as partners, co-researchers and co-authors, and partnerships that operated across disciplinary boundaries and beyond; that involved cross-institution collaboration; pedagogical co-creation and the re-conceptualising of learning. Together they provided refreshed notions of collegiality and collaboration in Higher Education that support new and more nuanced, and dynamic models of co-creation. The Special Issue started the conversation that we want to develop in this Symposium – to seed an ecology of collaborative practice for social justice – a more humane academia.
