About the Journal
Sponsors
IJSaP is supported by McMaster University’s Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation and Excellence in Teaching.
Focus and Scope
The focus of IJSaP is students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. This may involve students working with a wide variety of potential partners (referred to as staff) including academic staff/faculty, professional staff, other students, and other stakeholders (including librarians, alumni, industry, and the community).
The practice of engaging with students as partners is ultimately about sharing power and responsibility through relational and dialogic processes. Partnership approaches include students and staff as active collaborators in initiatives where those involved have co-responsibility for the development, practice, analysis, affirmation, and revision of practices related to learning and teaching.
There are many ways students and staff work together in partnership, including:
- mentoring, teaching, assessing, and peer learning
- researching within the discipline
- investigating learning and teaching experiences
- designing of courses and programs (co-creation of curriculum)
- pedagogic consultations
- representation and governance around teaching and learning
Partnerships in the transition into and out of higher education and in extra-curricular activities are also relevant where they have an impact on learning and teaching in higher education.
The term, students as partners, is both recognized and contested. The founding editors’ choice to use the term in the title of the journal constitutes an assertion of the importance of students taking their place among partners focused on learning and teaching in higher education. At the same time, it signals an invitation for critical dialogue among contributors and readers about how to name and how to continue to interrogate collaboration and co-creation among students and staff. Our commitment is to capture the many practices and the wide-ranging scholarly considerations through a diversity of writing genres.
We value and welcome practice-orientated and evidence-driven pieces as well as conceptual and reflective discussion pieces.
The focus of IJSaP is on the process of partnership rather than the outcomes of projects and initiatives. Hence all contributions must discuss the implications for partnerships in learning and teaching in higher education. In addition, all contributions need to communicate effectively to the international readership of the journal and avoid jargon and unnecessary or unexplained acronyms. Sufficient institutional-, disciplinary- and national-specific detail should be included to inform an international readership of the impact that local culture and politics have on the outcomes of the research or nature of the initiative discussed.
Peer Review Process
The pool of reviewers for IJSaP is sourced from an International Reviewer Panel who are supported and mentored as reviewers. The IJSaP International Reviewer Panel is comprised of staff and students. Reviewers with limited peer-review experience are invited to first conduct a practice peer-review on a mock article supported by a co-editorial team. This partnership model seeks to build the capacity of new reviewers, whilst ensuring high quality professionalism amongst the International Reviewer Panel.
Staff and students who have interest and experience in students as partners are encouraged to indicate their interest in joining the International Reviewer Panel by completing the Reviewer Expression of Interest Form.
Normally, student reviewers should be currently studying at the undergraduate or postgraduate level in higher education or have graduated in the last two years.
Co-editorial teams lead the review process for submissions to IJSaP. A ‘double-anonymous’ peer review process, where reviewers are both students and staff from the International Reviewer Panel, is normally employed for research articles, case studies, and reflective essays. Normally, two reviews per submission are sourced from the International Reviewer Panel. Otherwise, editorial review is typically used for opinion pieces and book reviews.
The review procedure for any other type of contribution is determined on a case-by-case basis.
Frequency
IJSaP is published twice a year.
Editorial Partnership Approach
IJSaP takes a partnership approach to the production of the journal with staff and students collaborating as co-editors.
Indexing
The International Journal for Students as Partners is indexed with the Directory of Open Access Journals, ERIC, Google Scholar, the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources, BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), ROAD (Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources), WorldCat, and Crossref.
