Partnerships are based on respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility between students and faculty. These qualities of relationship emerge when we are able to bring students’ insights into discussions about learning and teaching practice in meaningful ways — ways that make teaching and learning more engaging and effective for students and for ourselves. In our own teaching and in the partnership work we have studied, we have found that respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility are fostered when we draw on students’ insights not only through collecting their responses to our courses but also through working with them to study and design teaching and learning together.

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.

From the Foreword, by Kelly E. Matthews:

What does it mean to be in pedagogical partnership? How does it feel? What does it sound like? Who decides what happens? Who is learning in pedagogical partnership, how does that learning unfold, and what is being learned? Alison Cook-Sather and Chanelle Wilson have created a space for us to understand the stories of pedagogical partnership—thick descriptions giving life to what it means for students to be constructing pedagogical knowledge together with teaching staff (including faculty/academics, educational developers, librarians). We expect university teaching staff to have pedagogical knowledge and know-how (to what extent that they do is a different story). Yet the pedagogical partnerships described in rich, vivid, and (often) playful detail in this collection clearly reveal students’ pedagogical knowledge as well. Taken together, the combined pedagogical knowledge, as demonstrated in the following 10 chapters co-authored by 14 students and 10 teaching staff, extends and exceeds the capacity of individual learners and teachers. I understand why courage features as a strong line of sight throughout the book and in the title. It takes courage to challenge the status quo. It takes courage to imagine a different possibility and formation for learning in higher education. It takes courage to enact a different way of being a learner and a teacher that recognizes expertise through experience. It takes courage to name your experience, author your story, and then open yourself up to public gaze and comment.

Despite the reality that capacity to navigate uncertainty and change rather than prepare for any kind of fixedness and stability (Ilgen et al., 2019; Renn et al., 2011; Yurkofsky, 2022) is what is required in and by the world, educational institutions, including higher education, continue to focus on knowing and certainty, particularly knowing the right answer. As former SaLT student consultant Sarah Jenness (2013) writes: ‘school militates against uncertainty because we focus on getting the right answers as an end product as opposed to learning as a continuous phenomenon’ (p. 2). …Considering both her own learning and what matters most in education, Jenness (2013) concludes: ‘maybe what we need as students are spaces and relationships that let us sit with uncertainty and learn from it rather than rush from it to the “right” answers (p. 3).”

The construct of mattering was not one we set out to research. Instead, mattering is what we heard ‘new majority’ (Black, Indigenous, or Latinx) undergraduates who participated in student–student mentoring programs at LaGuardia Community College talk about in interviews conducted for the book Relationship-Rich Education (Felten & Lambert, 2020). It is also what we heard students from historically underrepresented groups (HUGs) describe in the 15 years’ worth of feedback and interviews regarding their experiences in student–faculty pedagogical partnerships in the Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges (Cook-Sather, 2020). While we concurred with aspects of ‘belonging’ that scholars argue for in relation to student learning and experiences in higher education (Strayhorn, 2012; Thomas, 2012) and have used the construct to analyze students’ experiences (Cook-Sather & Felten, 2017b; Cook-Sather & Seay, 2021; Felten & Lambert, 2020), listening carefully to what the LaGuardia, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford students were saying led us to revisit the less commonly evoked construct of mattering – which is related to but distinct from belonging.

This essay seeks to put into conversation four separate perspectives, including my own, of current and past BIPOC student consultants while explicitly looking at belonging and mattering. In the broadest sense, belonging can be thought of as a feeling connection and fit in a particular context, while mattering is, according to Cook-Sather and colleagues (2024), transferable across rather than dependent on context, and it is based on feeling valued for who one is rather than on fitting in. I will look at belonging and mattering through the lens of BIPOC student consultants’ experiences in the predominantly white institutions (PWI’s) of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. PWI’s, such as the Bi-Co, were not built for BIPOC students and faculty. Therefore, I take the stance that striving for belonging and mattering in these contexts is not only an act of resistance against the system but also a celebration of the diversity and wealth of perspectives that are gained through putting the perspectives of BIPOC student consultants in conversation. I utilize these claims to offer suggestions for further developing belonging and mattering for BIPOC students.