Speaker 1: It's a fantastic feeling to be here amongst you today. I would like to begin by thanking the organizers of this TEDx event and all of you for being here today to listen to a topic that I hold great passion for. If someone asked me, as an educator, who I look up to as a role model, I would say it's my father. For he invoked in me the curiosity to learn, to want to learn, and to embrace education in a manner which resonates with John Dewey's famous quote, education is not preparation for life, education is life itself. Unfortunately, my father did not have the opportunity to pursue higher education, as he had to take on family responsibilities from a very young age. But he was adamant to send his children to university. I, along with my siblings, happen to be the first generation in our family to have pursued higher education degree. When Sir Ken Robinson questioned if schools kill creativity, it made me think hard and reflect on my institutionalized educational journeys. I realized I actually stumbled into my creative potentials in primary school, thanks to some of my amazing teachers who relentlessly sought new ways to engage children to learn. When I went to college, and then to university, it seemed all that mattered was achieving that perfect grade point average and degree classification, for it was how my brain was programmed to think and to react. It did not really matter whether I was engaging with learning or not. For what really mattered was how efficiently I was able to regurgitate the contents of the curriculum into the exam scripts, essays, or reports. I've been teaching in higher education for a while now, and a very common question that I get asked by students is, is this topic important for the assignment? It truly sends me to a despair. Perhaps this argument from Alison Wohl's book, Does Education Matter?, could help to shed some light and explain the underlying reason behind this shift in students' expectation from their degree. A higher education qualification is increasingly a positional good that has value for competitive success in the labor market, rather than for the inherent qualities that a university education confers. In a 2016 TEDx event at the University of Bolton, Professor Patrick Magee gave a very compelling and insightful talk on why students should not be treated as customers. When we perceive students as customers, and when students perceive themselves as customers, they commodify their own process of intellectual and personal transformation. It also influences the teaching practices of the lecturers, for they may be reluctant to challenge the logic of students' thinking, or to give critical feedback for fear of receiving bad teaching evaluations. So what can higher education institutions do to counteract this us-versus-them divide in treating students as customers? What could we as educators do to uphold the quality and the integrity of teaching by not reducing its measure to mere customer satisfaction? Last year, I embarked on a transformative journey to challenge this conventional narrative of students as customers. I wanted to break the barriers of power hierarchy between staff and students, and blur the roles of content disseminators and inert receivers. I began embracing my students as partners in learning. When we engage students as partners in learning, it not only transforms students' knowledge as they engage with it, it transforms knowledge itself when students make sense of it. For example, in an increasingly digitally connected world, students are more likely to have access to electronic learning resources and digital technology compared to the educators. As educators, we can create and nurture learning environments through partnership, which inspires challenge, development, curiosity, and creativity, whereby students feel motivated and confident to reposition themselves as co-creators and co-producers of electronic learning resources instead of being passive consumers of such resources. When we encourage students to engage in meaningful partnership learning processes, it encourages them to be co-enquirers and take ownership of learning. If students do not understand the objectives of a good curriculum, how can we expect them to engage with it? Staff-student partnership gives an opportunity to the students to influence the curriculum they are taught. It gives an opportunity to the students to democratically negotiate how they wish to engage. I partnered with my first-year accountancy undergraduate students to co-design and co-deliver a formula, which enabled them to set their own learning objectives and assessment strategies to test learning has taken place. It also shifted the balance of power between myself and my students, for they chose to be the disseminators of knowledge and I a facilitator. This is a memento for my student partners from the European First-Year Engagement Conference, which was held earlier this year in Cork, Ireland in June. My student partners and I co-presented a paper on engagement through partnership for teaching and learning. As co-researchers, they expressed their views on how learning in partnership has enhanced their sense of belonging and changed university experience for them, and how it has empowered them to be independent learners. What you are seeing here is a brief moment of celebration and accreditation of the incredible achievements of my student partners by a community of international scholars and students. Do you know what the best part was about that presentation? My students co-produced a video and presented it virtually through interdisciplinary collaboration by collaborating with a first-year creative arts student from the University of Bolton. Staff-student partnership is about learning through mutual collaboration. It is about networking. It is about creating a ripple effect of knowledge by paying it forward as we help others to learn. At its roots, partnership is about investing in students with the power to co-create, not just knowledge or learning, but the higher education institutions itself. There is a proposition that people should be encouraged and enabled to elaborate their intellectual selves, and that higher education is one of the primary opportunities for this to occur. If we rethink student engagement, we might bring a little bit more meaning to students' pursuit of education, scholarship, knowledge discovery, and spark their imagination. To quote John Dewey before I finish, if we teach students today as we taught yesterdays, we rob them of tomorrow. Thank you.