From tension to quality: how student partners practice quality work
研究了高等教育中学生伙伴在担任学生和员工双重角色时面临的张力，以及他们解决这些张力的过程如何体现质量工作，对高校质量改进有参考价值。
Student partnerships are often promoted in research and policies to improve quality in higher education. Existing research focuses on outcomes of such partnerships, while the specific factors that unfold when student partners (SPs) enact their dual roles as students and employees remain underexplored. We also lack understanding of how SPs’ work relates to wider quality work practices at universities. Addressing this gap, we combine social practice and organisational perspectives to investigate which tensions SPs make sense of when working. We also explore how SPs’ attempts to resolve these tensions can be interpreted as engaging in quality work. To this end, we interviewed SPs who worked as colloquium leaders facilitating weekly sessions for first-semester students on legal methods at a law faculty; we also collected written reflections, observations, and documents. Using thematic analysis, we found that SPs faced and created tensions related to (a) their aims of creating collaborative colloquia and the competitive learning environment at the faculty, (b) the perceived expectations of teaching legal methods despite not being experts, and (c) ambiguities regarding whether SPs are expected to act as peers or facilitators. We found that these tensions typically emerged where local colloquium practice met institutional quality structures, implicit understandings of quality, and professional standards. By trying to find solutions locally, SPs indirectly engaged with quality work more systemically. We argue that SPs should be understood as actors in the quality system, and that SPs’ unique perspective should be used to explore existing tensions within learning environments and their development.