Centering Humanism in STEM Education through Student-Faculty Pedagogical Partnerships.
Co-authored by two students and a faculty member, this article reviews 32 publications focused on pedagogical partnership in STEM. It addresses the question: How do faculty and student partners experience, perceive, and act on the potential of student-faculty pedagogical partnership to humanize STEM education? Full of quotes from faculty and student partners across institutions, the article illustrates how partnerships matter in STEM fields, which are often seen as exclusionary and inattentive to the human experience of students and teachers.
We propose that one way to address the exclusionary culture, the lack of student voices in developing inclusive learning environments, and the overall dearth of humanism in STEM education is through the human and humanizing engagement that student-faculty pedagogical partnerships enact and support. As Bunnell et al. (2021) suggest, ‘learning from, partnering with, and highlighting the lived, subjective experiences of students in the classroom is a potentially powerful step towards inclusive education (de Bie et al., 2021; Cook-Sather, 2015, 2018),’ and student-faculty pedagogical partnership ‘may be particularly well suited” to addressing challenges “related to inclusive education in STEM’ (28). The transformative potential of the now-global practice of pedagogical partnership has been documented in a growing body of research on such partnership in STEM education. This article offers a review of a cross-section of that scholarship.