From student to student partner: revisiting student expertise and power in curriculum partnership

We have been colleagues in student-staff partnership (SSP) work at Western Sydney University (WSU), Australia, for just under four years, working initially in a team of staff, students, and external partners on a five-year, university-wide, strategic curriculum transformation project called 21C, and now on a suite of SSP projects with our team—the WSU Student Partners. Samuel started as a student partner in the third year of his Science and Business double degree just as COVID hit, and in early 2023, he became one of two Student Partner Coordinating Leads. Tai is the Academic Lead of Student-Staff Partnership and is a higher education researcher with an obsessive interest in critical university studies. We are both passionate SSP advocates, but our collective disposition is also towards criticality—in our case, puzzling through the multiple paradoxes involved in practising SSP. Most recently, we have started to think together on the challenge of how to grow SSP, and more specifically, on the institutional conditions that SSP needs to retain quality as a distinctive mode of engagement.