Week 5 - Ethical Foundations: Nurturing Integrity in Student-Staff Partnerships

 Week 5 - Ethical Foundations: Nurturing Integrity in Student-Staff Partnerships

 

In today's educational landscape, the relationship between students and staff is more dynamic and collaborative than ever before. As institutions evolve to meet the diverse needs of their communities, fostering ethical foundations within student-staff partnerships is paramount. These partnerships, built on mutual respect, trust, and integrity, are essential for creating a thriving academic environment. This week we explored how to nurture integrity in these vital relationships.

We began the webinar with an icebreaker asking an antithetical question to the topic for this week. How can we destroy partnerships as quickly and efficiently as possible? It’s always interesting to see how quickly we can come up with answers to what we don’t want. The same was true in this icebreaker. Responses came quickly, many said a break in communication, some mentioned attitudes of superiority, ghosting partners, belittling and many more. We then took a moment to reflect on whether any of these responses were happening in our own partnerships. This as expected required a lot of self-reflection. I found it to be a very humbling activity.

This week was all about engagement and reflection. After a short overview of the session we jumped right into another discussion reflecting on the design sprint in the previous week. Some points of reflection included the negotiation of power between staff and students over the stages of the design sprint, as well as equity in the online space.

Following on from this discussion, we began a presentation by facilitators Ashleigh and Tefo, on ethics in SSP. They discussed the gaps in the literature regarding ethics in partnerships. In my experience engaging with the literature, specifically Students as Partners literature, I have also found that there is very minimal discussion on ethical dilemmas. This is particularly true of the ethical dilemmas faced in the global south. This was a contributing factor to the shift towards Student-Staff Partnerships. The negotiation of power and rewards/recognition in SSP were also introduced by facilitators in this presentation.

A series of very useful ethical frameworks were also introduced. These were Deontology, Consequentialism, Relational Ethics and Ethics of Care. These came with detailed descriptions which proved very beneficial to participants. Some mentioned their gratitude for these frameworks towards the end of the session. Our facilitators also went over potential ethical dilemmas in SSPs so we could visualise the application of the frameworks.

After a much-needed break, we dived into another application of ethical frameworks with the DALA case study which was presented by Joe-Dean and myself (Esai).