When RAFA2 was conceived, one of its defining characteristics was the idea of it being a ‘student-led’ project. From initial meetings with the project teams across the collaboration, it was identified that this position needed unpacking. Expecting students to lead the project from the outset posed a risk to the project moving forward due to their lack of knowledge and experience.
BAME student voice has its merits, but it does not have a sufficient or holistic view of the inter-relationships of curricula, pedagogy, teacher, department/school/faculty, institution and sector – and how these works together. To expect them to lead and provide coherent, resourced, evidenced, formally-evaluated and sustainable changes in institutional and academic practices regarding race and inequality in HE was an unreasonable expectation.
The role of undergraduate BAME student partners is key to the project and sits at the heart of the RAFA2 approach. Students partnership can be described in many ways. They were co-creators, co-researchers, co-presenters and leaders in this project. The name we used for them, ‘student consultants’, is premised on pedagogical research that identifies students as having multiple roles in the HE context as consumers, clients, producers, co-producers, change agents and pedagogical consultants.
Within RAFA2, student consultants were supported to critically engage with the research literature. They became conversant with theoretical and empirical frameworks helping them to contribute to the project processes in meaningful ways – from the research design, data collection tools to the collection of data and data analysis.
All three providers gathered data (using questionnaires, focus group discussions and interviews) from academic staff and students across their institutions. Theoretical frameworks such as Deficit Theories and Critical Race Theories underpinned thematic content analysis of the transcripts (staff/student interviews, questionnaires and focus groups) which were synthesised in relation to noted key themes established in the literature.
The use of students as full partners meant that they partnered on areas including, learning teaching and assessment; pedagogic advice and consultancy; the scholarship of teaching and learning and subject-based research and inquiry concurs with a critical pedagogy perspective that places student voice and student engagement as central to the process of active critical engagement with their education (content – what is and isn’t known/told), their educational experience (process, pedagogy,) and the socio-cultural role and place of their identity (race/ethnicity/religion) in the physical and symbolic spaces and absences and omissions in the institution and the academy.