When engaging students as partners fails: the ease of maintaining the status quo
研究了一个学生与教师合作项目中未能改变传统权力关系的失败案例，运用布迪厄理论揭示高等教育体制和教师不稳定就业如何阻碍真正的伙伴关系，对关注教学改革和师生互动的学者有参考价值。
Responding to the rising scholarly call to investigate and report the challenges and risks of engaging students as partners (SaP), this article investigates an instance of failure to shift the traditional power relationship between students and teachers in partnership practices. Data were collected through individual interviews, focus groups, documents, and observations of the partnership project group meetings over one semester (16 weeks). Drawing on Bourdieu’s social field theory, we found that teachers and students unconsciously reproduced their established habitus and reinforced existing rules in the higher education (HE) field. The institutional hierarchical structure and teachers’ precarious employment status constrained the ability to enact a collaborative, dialogic student–teacher relationship in partnership. The constraints of the neoliberal HE landscape and culture are made more visible through Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, and field. Our analysis reveals that the reproduction of hierarchical relationship in partnership might not happen by chance but reflected tensions between the logic of practice in HE field and partnership values. The challenge of SaP lies in negotiating the cross-field tensions and preventing the reproduction of positions during the shift to a field. We argue that new possibilities emerge for SaP scholarship when the logic of HE is considered as a lens for analysis, shifting the dominant focus away from individual experiences. Future research can better capture and name the constraints and obstacles that impact student–teacher partnership beyond individual practices and aspirations.