Tai Peseta’s research while affiliated with Western Sydney University and other places

In this paper, we draw on an example of heuristic inquiry - (Re)imagining becoming a physiotherapist: a phenomenological approach - to illustrate the role that reflexivity and representation can play in physiotherapy research outcomes and the meaning they might have for moving the profession forward. Qualitative research in physiotherapy tends to acknowledge reflexivity as a route to objectivity by making researcher biases overt, yet the debate about data representation (a researcher's decision-making about how data are represented in a text) barely feature. This contrasts with qualitative research in other fields, including other health professions, where matters of representation (i.e., how knowledge is conveyed) are routinely debated and contested. Reflexivity, in fact, is much more than being transparent. Together with representation, reflexivity helps to position both the voices of participants and researchers within the research. The heuristic inquiry described in this paper offers new insights about learning to be a physiotherapist; it challenged assumptions about care in physiotherapy practice and it changed the first researcher's identity and practice. These insights were generated through the synergies between reflexivity and representation, and we argue that physiotherapy research has an opportunity to be more expansive by taking a commitment to reflexivity and representation more seriously.

Imagine this scenario: a group of doctoral scholars and supervisors in the field of higher education studies decide that the very institutional provision intended to support their research is inadequate to the task at hand. One response is to plough ahead, buckle down, and perhaps grumble our way through making the most of the resources on offer. Our response was to actively collaborate to co-create our own curriculum together, which we call #thesisthinkers. Because #thesisthinkers focuses on doctoral scholars (their identities as researchers, the research projects themselves, and their writing, and acts as a collective and developmental approach to supervision pedagogy, its curriculum is a partnership negotiated each year with those who participate in it as a form of interdependence. Is this a hidden doctoral curriculum? The lack of institutional support certainly leads us to the conclusion that its activities and practices remain under the radar. Yet, on its own merits, #thesisthinkers bears many of the hallmarks of a doctoral experience driven by a considered educational intention. If #thesisthinkers is a form of Hidden Curriculum, we suspect it is hidden in plain sight.

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.

While higher education (HE) is entrenched as a context for scholarly inquiry in Australian universities, there remains contest about it as a research field. Unlike other forms of ‘Education’, in Australia there is no undergraduate programme inducting students into HE's key questions, scholars, and inquiry modes. For new doctoral students, learning to make an original contribution to a field described as a practice, a discipline, and context is a persistent challenge. In this paper, we ‘think with’ the concepts of borders, paths and orientations to interrogate our practices as doctoral students and supervisors in the field of HE research, under the formation #thesisthinkers. We offer multiple accounts of how #thesisthinkers invites us to confront HE as a field, and in particular, how #thesisthinkers has invigorated us to build a useable landscape of the HE research field that sustains multiple pathways for doctoral researchers, leaving behind traces for others to tread.

Since 2014, the University of Sydney has been experimenting with a new initiative motivated by the research on “students as partners”. In 2014, six students were selected as Ambassadors of the Sydney Teaching Colloquium (STC)—the University’s annual learning and teaching conference—as undergraduate researchers. In that year, the focus was on assessment standards.

Students as Partners (SAP) initiatives are often framed as opportunities to reanimate university education so that students become active participants in their learning, and change agents capable of transforming their institutions. Embedded in these framings is a view that students are also the primary ‘experts’ of their learning experiences. This shift marks curious terrain about how staff come into partnership when students are encouraged to understand themselves as experts at the very same time the purpose of universities is beset with multiple and contradictory narratives, and the whole notion of expertise – even for academics – has become unsettled by the politics of a post-truth era. If the advocacy of student expertise is to be understood as a radical intervention to the marketised neoliberal university, as is often claimed, we argue that the desire for expertise has a more compelling basis when students are engaged with what Gina Hunter calls learning to ‘see institutionally’. In this article, we both describe, and put to work, Jeffrey J. Williams’s idea ‘teach the university’ as one mechanism for students and staff working in partnership to ‘see institutionally’. We then examine the nascent efforts of our own SAP initiatives to make a case for why ‘the university’ – as idea and institution – deserves to be introduced to, studied and critically interrogated by students as part of a long tradition of inquiry. While a good many SAP initiatives aim to address where students are absent, under-represented or disempowered in the university, very few appear to take seriously that there is a field of scholarship about universities that lends credibility and contest to the notion of expertise. By staging a conceptual encounter between Williams, Hunter and our own partnership work, the potential for SAP is expanded as project that cares for the future university.