Join Jessica Riddell and Tiffany MacLennan in their webinar on Tuesday, May 24, 2022, to discuss their chapter in Taking Stock 2.0.
Although we know high-impact practices (HIPs) contribute to quality undergraduate education, they are is a lack of awareness of these practices in higher education, from classroom design to strategic plans. HIPSs are not widely used by faculty, nor are they always accessible to a diverse range of students. According to George Kuh (2008), HIPs are evidence-based principles that have clear links to student learning, engagement, and retention. These include:
- collaborative assignments
- undergraduate research (working directly with a faculty member)
- writing-intensive courses
- signature first-year experiences
- building common intellectual experiences (usually through learning communities)
- service and community-based learning
- experiential learning (e.g., internships, co-op, field experience, practicums)
- international field study and global learning
- a capstone experience (senior project or thesis, portfolio, etc.) (Kuh, 2008)
If these practices are widely accepted features of quality undergraduate education, we seek to understand why they are not embedded in all undergraduate programs at every institution across Canada and beyond. We suggest that using a students as partners (SAP) model helps increase awareness of and advocacy for high-impact practices (HIPs), and concomitantly increases inclusivity and accessibility for underrepresented minority students (URMS). Furthermore, our own experience of engaging in HIPs was illuminating because we both benefited from the process of writing together in fields that were outside our disciplinary expertise (science and literature, respectively). Furthermore, this chapter was co-authored by a faculty and a student; this partnership was a model of reciprocal mentorship so that the power dynamics of mentor and mentee that is usually present in undergraduate research supervision were flattened in productive and illuminating ways.