A Partnership Outcome Spaces framework for purposeful student-staff partnerships

The benefits of student-staff partnerships are widely reported in the Students-as-Partners literature. It is envisaged that partnership initiatives can have a transformative effect on institutional cultures, however, how this transformation might be achieved is less clear. Building on transdisciplinary and systems change perspectives, we propose a Partnership Outcome Spaces framework to develop an understanding of how student-staff partnerships might influence institutional cultures. We identify four outcome spaces: situation, knowledge, learning and relationships, with reflexivity and a structured partnership methodology as key enablers of these outcomes. This framework is applied to a case study examining a Student Services Hub project in one Australian university. Through this analysis, the importance of less tangible and relational outcomes arising from student-staff partnerships are highlighted. To influence institutional culture change, we encourage student-staff partnership practitioners to purposefully negotiate the various possible outcomes of their initiatives as an integral part of the partnership process.