 Thank you for that welcome. And thank you so much for having me here today. It's a real privilege, actually, to talk to a group of people that myself in the US wouldn't normally have to have access to and wouldn't normally have the space to talk to. So thank you. And today I am going to talk about, how we can shape the development of a new culture of learning through partnership between learners and educators. I want to first be clear that I'm coming to you from the perspective of an experienced student representative, not an educationalist, and therefore I want to talk not about the use of specific tools and techniques to engage students in their learning, as your colleagues will be covering this in the sessions over the next few days. Instead, I'm offering a political view of the prevailing culture of learning in higher education and the direction I think we ought to strive for it to head. I'm going to touch on three main points. Firstly, I'm going to talk about why NUS Think's partnership is an ideal model for working in higher education and what this might look like. I'm then going to explore how, in the capacity of your roles as educators, as leaders, as key support in the enhancement of teaching and learning, you can build these cultures of partnership in a way that works for your institution. And thirdly, I'm going to bring in some lessons from NUS's recent work on the opportunity students have had to shape their learning environments. Over the past year, NUS has approached its work with the aim of developing partnerships between institutions and student unions. We think it's important that we don't just anecdotally decide something is demonstrative of a partnership approach, but that our actions have an ethos behind them, which work towards the realisation of partnership. Therefore, before we discuss NUS's experiences of how this is being realised in the sector, we want to talk about the values underpinning the development of this type of learning culture. Without articulating our values, we're in danger of applying the language and ideas of partnership in retrospect to student engagement processes or specific one-off schemes and projects. The existence of a course representative system or student surveys of satisfaction with learning resources does not, in and of itself, signal partnership. And let us be clear from the outset that some total of an institution's student engagement mechanisms does not and will never equal partnership. In order to understand how NUS arrived at the partnership model, I'm going to provide some context by first discussing student engagement. We've already heard those words spoken today. The imperative for student engagement is based on the idea that students should be active participants in the learning process rather than passive recipients of knowledge. In the sector, we see two distinct applications of the term, which can often be muddled and therefore I want to draw a distinction. In the bulk of literature, student engagement is concerned with the time and effort on the part of students in relation to their learning or wider student experience. The impact of high levels of engagement on individual student success, retention and personal development have been often repeated. But the UK context is one of student representation. The Higher Education Funding Council for England defined student engagement in 2008 as the process by which institutions and sector bodies make deliberate attempts to involve and empower students in the process of shaping their learning experience. We can see a fundamental difference of definition here between a traditional definition of student engagement that looks at students' level of investment in their learning versus a newer, often UK-specific definition that focuses on the power of students to have an influence in determining what their learning environment looks like. The earlier definition is probably a precondition of the latter and I would expect students would have to have some kind of personal investment in their learning in order to feel the need to have an influence on it. And in our discussion around partnership, I'm going to focus on the latter concept. But why bother with the second form of student engagement and why bother with ensuring it is undertaken through a partnership approach? There is an argument that students should be engaged in influencing their learning environment because it is the right thing to do. And that is part of creating a democratic, participative institution in which the academic principle that one is permitted to have one say is more important than whether your ideas are widely adopted. There is also a professional value which we all strive for as educationalists which is associated with the exchange of constructive feedback in support of reflection and improving in learning for both students and teacher. Importantly, it's also about offering an alternative to a consumer model of education that is creeping into our sector. This consumer model reduces complex interactions to near transactions and devalues the role and expertise of educators. The consumer model could create a dangerous imbalance. The role of educators is reduced, students' power appears great but is in fact limited to commenting only on what has been sold to them and student satisfaction is substituted for learning. So, if partnership is worth striving for, what does it look like? Think of the role of academics in universities. In research, you perceive the limitations of existing knowledge and often the limitations of the epistemic models through which our beliefs about what are true are filtered. Academics are critical of the state of things and through research and scholarship, act to change them in some way through engagement with peers and experts and through the exercise of imagination. Active students can do this too. Engaged students can look at the university at their classroom, at their students' union and see how things might be improved. And if the pathways are available to them, they can work with academics, with other students, with their representatives and sabbatical officers and university staff to extend the limits of what we believe university is and is for. The students whose ideas are welcomed, who is actively encouraged to contribute and who feels a sense of responsibility in working within a diverse academic community of staff and students to do interesting things. That student is truly a partner. And when that student graduates, he or she will take that ethos of active responsibility into the wider world and the world will be better for it. Even better if universities and students' unions facilitate opportunities for students to do things in the wider world while studying as part of the developing ethos of responsibility. An institution that invests in supporting its students to be influential in decision making also sends positive messages above the other side of student engagement about valuing learning and a sense of belonging. I believe and have demonstrated to me in my experience working with students that they are keen to be influential in decision making if given the opportunity. NUS recently undertook a piece of research for desire to learn into student perspectives on the role of technology in their educational experience, which I think you'll have an opportunity to hear more about in more detail later on in the conference. But for now I want to touch on some findings of this research. We often hear from students that they feel bombarded with surveys and other feedback seeking mechanisms during their studies, which was unsurprisingly for me confirmed by this study. However, many students stressed they would be keen to engage more if we were to change the nature of their contributions. There were two things they identified as important in being able to contribute to changes in their learning environments. Having the processes of change made more transparent in order to understand why certain decisions have been taken and why others have not. And changing from feedback to two way conversations where not only are students consulted but they have a role to play in the development of solutions. These students identified technology and its ability to improve cross institutional and cross disciplinary collaboration as a catalyst that could facilitate a change in relationships with their institution and empower them to make more meaningful contributions. Partnership is often phrased in these terms of student empowerment, but you don't empower somebody except by in some sense taking power away from somebody else. And therefore staff can sometimes experience student empowerment as staff disempowerment. And we hypothesize that student empowerment and staff empowerment might actually be linked because it locates academic decision making as a negotiation between academics and students rather than in a handful, in the hands of a small group of senior managers and pushed on the rest of the institutional community. We criticise central centralized institutional policy making because we feel it deprives students and academics of that meaningful conversation at course and discipline level and because it always runs the risk of creating a compliance culture where boxes are ticked rather than changes made. Universities, particularly staff involved in delivery, have the power and ability to support and nurture certain kinds of behaviors and to help students become one thing or another. To me that is what teaching is. Students may adopt behaviors we associate with consumerism unless we offer a new and compelling way of thinking about learning. In the absence of policy changes, our shared challenge as a sector is to do our very best to eclipse the effects of the consumerist model. Not only should staff therefore have a vested interest in the development of partnership cultures in an institution, but they are imperative to its success. Staff working across the institution, not just in leadership roles, must be involved in critical and informed dialogue about the values of partnership and the development of new practice. This can only happen if a partnership approach is dispersed throughout the institution from course to senior management levels. A culture of partnership will filter down to shape the types of learning by individuals in our institutions and to do so we need to challenge the behaviors of habit with new practice, not just with rhetoric. An example from our experience on changing the learning landscape, those of you who support academic staff start by rethinking how you provide training. When training them in using technology to enhance their teaching, include students in the process. Reconceptualize this not as guidance for the academic, but guiding the behavior and changing the interaction between these two who are jointly contributing to the learner's learning experience. When we train academics in technology, they will return to old habits. What we need to do is demonstrate to them students using tools to learn in a way they couldn't before and for academics to have an opportunity to interact with these learners to understand why. The only way to do that is in context. This will enable us to understand the impact of technology on changing the learning experience and for the learner to be integral in enhancing their own experience. In addition, we have a professional culture where the delivery of education happens in a space with no other colleagues present, just the educator and the learners. However, many of you work across disciplines and levels of study and are therefore particularly well placed to identify good and often bad practice and share these lessons with others. But when we are identifying instances of best practice, we need to think is something good practice if it does not contribute to the development of the culture we want to set in learning. Therefore, your role in driving cultural change can be to analyze these practices while mindful of the values underpinning them. The learning experience is not just about academic performance and growth. We see universities as civic institutions and therefore they must consider the impact of their changing cultures outside the walls, often the built like fortresses outside the walls of their institution. Engagement with local communities and encouraging the development of civically engaged students is the key outcome of partnership. And it's important that this point does not get lost on the wider debate of what higher education is for and it's important as a public good. And this is an area where we in HE must heed lessons from further education. FE institutions, who students often maintain close ties within their local communities, understand the value in being part of these communities. Staff and students actively seeking out this engagement with the public is one way that demonstrates not only it is possible but it's an important function of educational institutions in society to be a public good. And the example I'll give is often further education institutions teach English to the families of those students who study there. And I think that's hugely important. As education list, you therefore have the opportunity to meet the forefront of this cultural shift by embedding a culture of partnership on the grounds through challenging educator learner norms by giving learners the space to collaborate and to make impact on the local environments. Highlighting good and bad practice ensuring this is done with a values driven approach and engaging outside of the institution in your work. Changing cultures only happens through dialogue with our peers and therefore I want us to start the conversation around partnership, around how students are engaging in strategically shaping their learning environments. I'm really interested to hear what's going on in your institutions and I hope I have the opportunity to do so sort of as this finishes. In addition, NUS is currently undertaking a national mapping exercise of student engagement in which we hope to explore the nature of these initiatives and how they can be better supported by students unions. I'm going to spend the rest of my time briefly outlining some of NUS's and our member unions latest work on students as partners. Our research with Desire to Learn demonstrated that the majority of students feel confident that their skills in utilising technology in their learning are at least as high if not higher than their lecturers. Whether this confidence is accurate or not is another question, but this confidence is the first steps in being empowered to act utilising these skills. Surprisingly, we have therefore been discovering in our work with Technology Enhanced Learning that there is a lot of good practice in partnership developing. So I wanted to give you some examples to put partnership in context and showcase some good practice. Last year we began to work on the Changing the Learning Landscape Initiative together with OALT and JISC, the HEA and the Leadership Foundation. We have had the opportunity to work with students unions as they navigate strategic change in the use of learning technologies to improve teaching and learning in partnership with their institutions. Some initiatives have challenged their institutional cultures by starting a dialogue around existing structures and relationships and others are still exploring. Liverpool Hope and Liverpool Hope Students Union have been working together in developing partnership as part of the programme. An imperative for the student body was the improvement of the VLE. The student union undertook to lead the development in this area. In order to have an evidence-led approach change and engage a wider range of the student body in what they were doing, they started by undertaking research on holding forums for discussion. They then worked with learning technologists, ICT and learning and teaching experts to find resolutions. These proposed solutions were then discussed, modified and reasoned with the student body in order to involve them in the development of the Moodle as well as demonstrate to them how their input was being utilised in the enacting of change. The students union was very good at communicating this to the student body throughout the process and about exciting students at their agency to enact change. In turn, they've been finding they're able to excite staff, particularly academic staff, about their own agency to shape the direction of their institution. The Liverpool Hope example demonstrates at the institutional level of how students can be involved in long-term strategic change. However, I'd like to turn now to an example of how practitioners at a local level are driving a cultural shift towards partnership. Birmingham City University Student Academic Partners initiative is an example of how staff and students are collaborating at local levels to enhance teaching and learning and change the nature of the relationship between staff and students. The projects see individuals work through their research, development and implementation of innovations in specific courses or departments. The students union have been leading this initiative for the last four years, with student staff teams bringing forward projects spanning areas from the novel use of social media for assessments to creating learning communities among trainee teachers. You may have come across these projects at other events or in literature in the area of partnership and I wanted to bring it up to identify two lessons to take away from them. Students and staff are empowered to be involved at multiple stages of change, with agendas set collaboratively rather than earmarking a role for students without their participation in making this decision or marginalising their involvement to consultation. An outcome of this is the start of a dialogue within the institution, when other students and individual staff members saw that they had agency to make a change, they are empowered to do more. Additionally, the initiative was value driven and purposely intended to bring around a cultural change. Birmingham City and the Students Union launched the initiative explicitly with the aim of building community. It was key that a diverse range of students and staff were involved, that there was a collective ongoing negotiating between these groups over the ethos of the programme. In other student focus programmes we often see drivers of employability or boosted NSS scores. These don't just end up creating a culture for change as a result of a different way of students being involved in their learning environments. There needs to be a deliberate dialogue revisited regularly around what partnership means for each institution. We take the approach that any partnership arrangement should be available for disputes and negotiation, otherwise it isn't appropriate to higher education institutions. What partnership means and how it is enacted will vary between different institutions but it should be jointly owned and kept under the review of institutional managers, staff and students. Before I open up to your questions I want to leave you with my thought on a challenge we are often presented when delivering work in this area. The students may be partners in principle but can never be equal partners because they do not have the necessary expertise to engage with academic staff on equal basis. Students have the potential capacity to have a meaningful view of matters relating to research, to access learning resource provision, community engagement and all the rest of an institution's concerns, not because of any specific expertise they hold but because understanding and engaging in these decisions is an important part of being in a community. Moreover, taking responsibility in that academic community means being involved in delivery, not just making demands of your institution and waiting for those demands to be fulfilled. We could talk about the ways different technologies could improve student engagement or how students could be involved. However, what was most impactful were the opportunities for staff to hear from staff and students in a conversation about the impact of changed practices on the way they learn. It became apparent through these discussions that equality as it is envisioned in partnership is not about a parity of technical or pedagogical expertise as you may have had the head of teaching and learning working with a student representative who has never engaged with these tools before, but it is about the opportunity for all parties to express views in good faith and understand where they may have expertise in unique areas including students. I hope I've given you a sense of the values that we think can underpin partnership. I also hope you've had an opportunity to think about how all of you, whether in student facing or leadership roles or otherwise, can start a dialogue in your work around this area locally. If you want any more information about any of our work in this area, please let me know and I'll pass you on to a relevant person inside NUS. I hope you'll be empowered to question the values behind student engagement practices at your institution and get together with staff and students and establish agreed upon values of what partnership looks like at your institution. I hope you're also empowered to approach partnerships as the necessary goal of any of your student engagement practices. Thank you.