Students as Partners, as People, as Progress
This guest post is written by Soren Aldaco, a third-year undergraduate student at The University of Texas at Austin. They were on the Student Coach Team of the Collaborative for Access and Equity — an innovative and successful pilot project directed by Dr. Stephanie W. Cawthon to improve accessibility, equity, and inclusion for disabled college students — and collaborated with faculty to expand the scope of autistic perspectives. A member of the Students as Partners Initiative at UT Austin’s Center for Teaching and Learning, Soren is majoring in Humanities, Sociology, and Critical Disability Studies.
The student-teacher relationship is reciprocal. Just as it is a student’s job to study, it is a teacher’s job to teach — and when we embrace our shared roles as learners, we keep the organism of academia alive.
That’s the beauty of Students as Partners, a collaborative approach to education.
Partnering with Students
The concept itself is relatively straightforward. Within the Students as Partners model, traditional hierarchies are broken down, and students are posited as partners to, rather than subordinates of, teachers and other faculty.
Put simply, Students as Partners centers students in their learning. Educators are subsequently encouraged to value the impact of their practice, in addition to their intent.
While it’s true that professors are experts in their field, their insight into how students learn is relative. After years of study and practice, perspective is bound to change. Beyond this, given the rapid evolution of technology and pedagogy, it’s easy to understand why feedback might be necessary
In fact, feedback from students is necessary.
I May Not Be Your Obvious Feedback Partner
My relationship with school was tense growing up. I was a curious and intelligent child with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, yet I was too "rowdy" and verbal to be considered good. In an environment designed for still, uninvolved learning, I received behavioral marks almost daily. My teachers struggled to understand me, and I struggled to understand them — except for a patient few.
One such individual, Mr. Barrie, catered to my strengths and needs by inviting me to help organize his classroom in the mornings. This arrangement was symbiotic, helping us both in different ways. As I developed the skills of trust and responsibility, he gained valuable feedback on the inner workings of sixth grade.
Mr. Barrie and I embodied the spirit of Students as Partners long before we knew how to describe it.
Students are Untapped Potential
You see, some of our greatest moments occur when we let our egos down and invite others in.
Outsiders are rarely present in university classrooms. Students, therefore, represent an untapped potential for constructive feedback in the campus community. They lead complex lives, which afford them valuable lived experience and perspective, and as a resource, they provide an “in” for those seeking to understand how modern education really works.
An exception to this norm is the Collaborative for Access and Equity. This initiative draws on the Students as Partners model with the aim of weaving accessible practice right into higher education’s DNA. In this, disabled perspectives are centered rather than marginalized.
The Disabled Student Perspective
While most understand disability and accessibility through the lens of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the lived reality of disabled people tells us that this is not enough. In a way, the ADA is the floor, not the ceiling.
When it comes to higher education, where disabled populations are severely underrepresented, this means that accommodations tend to be vague and poorly implemented. Likewise, faculty and staff tend to have a generally poor understanding of the disabled student experience.
The result?
Disabled students are forced to either tirelessly self-advocate or go without, making an already-scarce pool of time and energy even scarcer.
In stressing the significance of long-term mindset shifts over short-term checklists of accommodations, the Collaborative encouraged our team of five student coaches and seven faculty to go beyond the ADA. We incorporated structured student-faculty dialogue, meticulously searched for blindspots, and critically discussed the accessibility of our learning environments.
Most importantly, though, we asked ourselves difficult questions: What did students really need? Where were faculty expectations misaligning?
For me, this meant taking a deep dive into a field that, on its surface, appeared to be ahead of the game.
The Neurodivergent Perspective
Prior to our partnership in the Collaborative, I had already taken two classes taught by Associate Professor of Special Education Katie Tackett, PhD.
Her signature course, Autism and Neurodiversity, was a wonderful introduction to cognition’s long-misunderstood social history — and her web-based research methods course, Autism Spectrum Disorder, taught me a lot about the approach used in education.
Truth be told, Katie had done a wonderful job making her courses accessible on a structural level — there was plenty of assignment variety, and she emphasized flexibility over standardization as much as she could.
On a content level, however, neurodivergent perspectives were seriously lacking. That is, neurodivergent people had not been consulted in the construction of a course about neurodivergent people… which is likely more common than we think.
Now, I preface all this with the fact that I believe everyone exists on a continuum of functioning. In my eyes, there is no true “neurotypical” baseline — and, in consideration of systemic factors, diagnosis itself tells me very little about a person’s needs or ability.
That said, I have a lived experience so markedly “atypical” that I was first diagnosed with ADHD at age 6, during a time when ADHD girls and women were unheard of. This would eventually evolve into a comorbid diagnosis of ADHD and autism nearly a decade later, at which point I began to question exactly why it took the school system so long to recognize my struggles — and why I had to have a diagnosis for them to help me in the first place.
I ended up co-founding my very own virtual space just one year later, providing education on autistic people by autistic people to an audience of over 14,000.
On Being Misunderstood and Othered
But despite my obsessive interest, and despite Katie’s care, embracing the academic side of neurodiversity meant frequent feelings of exhaustion and misunderstanding.
As Monique Botha writes in the beyond-words-beautiful Academic, Activist, or Advocate? Angry, Entangled, and Emerging, “...it seems no one has stopped to ask whether autism research is, at its core, hospitable to autistic involvement, nor fully explored the damage often done to autistic people in their involvement.”
In studies as recent as 2018, autistic people have been described as “undomesticated” and “incapable of community” — and while taking even Katie’s class, I came across one assignment asking students to “translate [a study’s] findings into family-friendly language” by imagining that they were talking to “a person on the spectrum themself.”
In a field directly related to disability, my faculty partner and I were forced to consider the topics we were teaching as much as how we were teaching them. In the end, using additional funding from the UT Center for Teaching and Learning’s Students as Partners Initiative, I reviewed each unit in Katie’s Autism Spectrum Disorder course with respect to my expertise as a neurodivergent person.
Opening Our Hearts
My goal?
To share feelings of distress alongside hope and suggestion, so that the humanity of neurodivergent experience will be preserved for those who have lived it as much as those who are learning it.
From cultural difference to cognitive difference to hierarchical difference to generation gap — Students as Partners acts as a bridge for making academia feel less like hallways and books and more like mentorship and learning.
As faculty open their minds up to students, so too will they open up their hearts.
And as students open their hearts up to faculty, so too will they open up their minds.
Two heads are better than one, after all, and a spectrum of heads is priceless.
