Leveraging student expertise in the Learning Assistant (LA) Model: The importance of understanding diverse LA and Instructor Partnerships

Discipline-based Education Research has provided the STEM college community with tools to assess learning, details on the state of student knowledge, and instructional materials that have shown to be effective in promoting understanding. While this work has had a major impact on instruction, the majority of this work has been done at R1, primarily white universities. Our work on understanding student learning and implementing instructional reform at a predominantly black institution, has highlighted specific strengths in our STEM community. These efforts suggest that involving students as collaborators in developing effective and inclusive learning spaces has far-reaching benefits for both students and instructors. The Learning Assistant (LA) Model (Otero et al., 2006) provides opportunities where student voice is valued and rich teaching partnerships can develop between LAs and instructors. The Model provides the potential for LAs to take up power and responsibility and allows us to leverage the expertise of diverse students. We describe different LA-faculty partnerships and provide examples of how LAs can be invited, as collaborators, where they are integral participants in instructional design. We show that involvement in these partnerships is important to LAs feeling like valued members, rather than guests, in learning and teaching communities. We draw on the framework of “rightful presence” (Calabrese-Barton & Tan, 2017), used to understand equity-oriented teaching, as a useful lens in analyzing collaborative partnerships in the LA Model, that welcome co-thinking between LAs and instructors, on how best to support all learners.
Otero, V., Pollock, S., McCray, R., & Finkelstein N. (2006) Science Who Is Responsible for Preparing Science Teachers?
Barton, A. C., & Tan, E. (2017). Designing for rightful presence in STEM-rich making: Community ethnography as pedagogy.