Integrating students as curriculum partners in higher education has attracted attention centred on the authenticity and validity of student partners' expertise in curriculum development. Extant literature has broadly covered the pros and cons of working with student partners in curriculum development, and from this discourse, other research strands have emerged. Our paper reports on insights from implementing a three-way curriculum development partnership involving student curriculum partners, industry partners and academic faculty experts to develop an innovative curiosity learning pod to develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills for a trans-disciplinary cohort of students at an Australian university. We reinforce the importance of the student voice in partnership pedagogy. The project is set within a context of feedback from students and employers citing a lack of problem-solving and critical thinking skills that can be used across different disciplines, impacting students' work readiness to address real-world problems. Key insights from the paper include: (1) the importance of strategic framing of the curriculum development objective; (2) the need for a diverse trans-disciplinary student curriculum partner, an understanding of the complexity of the notion of student's voice in the co-creation process; (3) managing the dynamics of industry experts' input and their interaction with student partners; (4) managing expectations of all the partners; (5) challenges of getting institutional support or buy-in for the project and integrating the learning pod into an ongoing course.

Authors:
Tendai Chikweche, Western Sydney University, Australia
Hossain Mohammed, Western Sydney University, Australia
Munir Hossain, Western Sydney University, Australia

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Tendai Chikweche is teh Director of Academic Programms for the Marketing, International Business and sports management discipline at Western Sydney University, Australia. He is a leading researcher on bottom-of-pyramid markets.

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