How student support programs can transform universities

The way we think about education is changing for the better. While some of the biggest transformations are technological, one of the most important is the teacher-student relationship.  

The future of university, it appears, will be built on mutual understanding, trust and collaboration.  

In other words, it’s all about working together to find the best way forward. 

This is the goal of student support programs like Deakin’s Students as Partners. These programs bring passionate students and staff together, like Deakin’s Director of Student Outcomes Dr Cassandra Iannucci and Deakin student/Students as Partners officer Alex Green, who are motivated to make university access more inclusive, respectful and better for everyone.  

Chatting with Dom Hennequin for the latest Stories of Wonder podcast, Iannucci and Green share their own stories, their passion for Students as Partners, and explain why student support programs are so important.

What do student support services and programs look like?

According to Iannucci, the idea of a student support service like Students as Partners is to change the relationship between students and staff.  

‘Students as Partners shifts the focus from doing things for students to doing things with students,’ Iannucci says. ‘It recognises the unique expertise that students bring and that’s their lived experience. And you engage in a collaboration which eventually and intentionally leads to better outcomes, more inclusive experiences, and things that are just more meaningful because they’re made in co-decision making with students and staff together.’ 

For educators like Iannucci, this attitude shift is the first step. As Iannucci says, t’s very much about levelling the playing field and changing the dynamic between staff and students. 

‘I came to it from a value of recognising my students as partners and thinking about how I can create a community and lean hard into relationships first as a grounding for then learning to occur,’ Iannucci says.

Examples of student support services in action 

Students as Partners is one example of a student support program, and it’s guided by five core principles: 

• Reciprocal learning between students and staff 
• Recognition of students’ expertise in their lived experiences 
• Shared responsibility across stakeholders 
• Supporting respect and transparency 
• Repositioning students from users to our co-creators 

It’s up to members to put these principles into action – as Alex Green knows well.  

‘I think the most tangible shift I’ve seen is in how the staff that I’ve partnered with interact with students moving forward,’ Green says. ‘I’ve been able to go on to partner with a lot of the staff leads that I’ve worked with in projects outside of Students as Partners. And just seeing the shift in how they show up to class and meet students where they’re at, to me, is probably the most valuable thing.’ 

One student support program is Coffee Conversations. As Iannucci explains, it’s a way to bring students and teaching staff together in an open, honest, and equal setting.  

‘You walk over after class, sit down, have a bit of a yarn over a cup of coffee,’ Iannucci says. ‘And the conversation, usually with the relational-first lens, ends up talking about some feedback and student experience. And then what we can do is listen to that feedback, make changes to our practice for the next week of classes. And then you stand up there in front of this class each week and say, “Hey, I heard what you said last week. You wanted more of this so today I’ve put more of that in my class.” And the students can then see that we’re tightening that feedback loop.’

What is the role of student support officers? 

As an Officer supporting Students as Partners, Green helps facilitate the student support program.This involves partnering student mentors with staff, offering student support and writing reports. More than anything, though, student support officers like Green are there to engage with students – particularly those who might otherwise struggle to have their voices heard. 

‘I think students can tell when we engage with them in a way that is not authentic and creating this safe space for students within Deakin has been, from my personal experience, humanising, confidence building, capacity building,’ Green says. ‘But I think we are really trying to prioritise student voices that are often left out of the conversation. Because those are often the students who need direct support and are missing out on that relational aspect of what it is to be at university.’

How do support staff improve student learning? 

Everyone has different goals for their time at university. It’s fair to guess, though, that learning is high on most people’s lists.  

One way that Students as Partners and similar programs can support student learning is through collaboration – like students and staff co-creating assessments. 

 ‘Sometimes we have examples of students who have finished the unit and who are currently in the unit and who are coming into the unit,’ says Iannucci. ‘So if it’s a core unit, we might have the next year’s cohort students join that partnership and they sit down together and say, “Hey, let’s co-create this assessment task” so that not only is the task itself genuinely seen as meaningful, relevant, and worthwhile to the student, but there’s also this relationality that’s built into it. Other students then trust that, hey, this was designed by my peers with my best interest.’

How support services for students shape university access and inclusion  

Alex Green knows what it’s like to be a marginalised voice, with lived experience in being a proud member of both the queer and the disabled community. It’s an experience that Green says inherently leads to advocating for those in similar situations. 

 ‘So, there’s a reason that the students we partner with are not only passionate about improving the experience for other students, but they have lived experience in needing to adapt and change their way of thinking and change the language they use,’ Green says.  

 ‘And I actually think a lot of the staff we partner with can learn from students in that way. I also think that lived experience can create a safe space for other students. So other students who identify in those communities can sort of see themselves reflected in students who have been able to make significant change at the university. And it’s an opportunity for students to impact decisions that directly affect them.’ 

As Iannucci explains, support services for students are about fostering this sort of inclusion and ‘co-creating a university that is for the people.’ 

 ‘When we think about universities, they were originally designed for a small group of privileged white upper class men,’ Iannucci says. ‘And we still see echoes of that in our systems and the ways that universities are run today. And through our partnership practices and our equity first lens, it allows us to really step into believing that it’s our responsibility as a university to change.’ 

With student support programs run by passionate, highly-driven staff and students like Cassandra Iannucci and Alex Green, we can be confident that universities will continue changing for the better.