Campus talks: how to make co-creation work in your teaching

eally enjoyed this conversation with Professor Bovill, her practical wisdom about making co-creation work in different contexts is exactly what the field needs right now. A few things struck me as I listened. First, her point about students bringing expertise academics simply don't have. I've been thinking about this a lot in my own work. Students know things we can't access, where feedback disappears into the void, how a rubric actually feels at 2am before a deadline, why a peer learning activity either builds community or makes everyone feel more isolated. That's not just "student voice" to be consulted; it's genuine experiential expertise that should shape how we design learning. When I've worked with student partners on SoTL research, the questions they ask are often ones I wouldn't have thought to ask, and that's the point, isn't it? I'm curious what others think about something Professor Bovill touches on around quality. In my experience, one of the biggest barriers to co-creation isn't resistance to sharing power, it's genuine uncertainty about how to maintain rigour while genuinely sharing authority over what "rigour" means. How do we co-design assessment when we're also responsible for certification? I don't think there are easy answers here, but I've found that being honest about that uncertainty with students actually strengthens the partnership rather than undermining it. There's something Cook-Sather calls "unknowingness", the idea that admitting what we don't know prepares us to navigate complexity together. The other thing I keep wrestling with is who gets into co-creation spaces in the first place. Professor Bovill rightly notes that co-creation looks different across contexts, and I'd extend that to students themselves. After a decade doing this work across Australian universities, I've become uncomfortably aware of my own recruitment patterns, how partnership invitations often go to students who are already confident, articulate, schedule-flexible. What about students working multiple jobs? Students whose cultural backgrounds make challenging a teacher feel inappropriate? Neurodivergent students whose communication styles don't fit our workshop formats? The students who most need transformed educational relationships may be the ones least likely to be invited into partnership. One approach I've been developing, and I'd genuinely welcome feedback on this, is to ask "Who's produced as unpartnerable?" before designing any partnership initiative. Not as a checklist, but as a genuine inquiry: what assumptions about the "good partner" are we smuggling in? What institutional structures make partnership accessible to some students and impossible for others? It's made me rethink everything from when we schedule partnership activities to how we frame invitations. Finally, I appreciated Professor Bovill's emphasis on co-creation as process, not just outcome. In some recent work with First Nations students at Charles Darwin University, we found that the relational dimension, how we worked together, not just what we produced, was where the real transformation happened. Students described moving from feeling like "cultural informants" to "intellectual partners," and that shift changed how they saw themselves in the university. That's not something you can measure in a course evaluation, but it matters enormously. Would love to hear how others are navigating these tensions, particularly around quality, inclusion, and what makes co-creation feel genuine rather than performative. Associate Professor Seb Dianati USQ