Exploring understandings of partnership in higher education using methods from corpus linguistics

There has been a proliferation of references to partnership in the discourse of learning and teaching policy and practice over recent years (Healey, Flint & Harrington 2014, p. 12). Although the term is more frequently present in higher education documentation and parlance, there is little agreement over what constitutes a partnership in learning and teaching (Healey et al. 2014) and it is recognised that the term is difficult to define (Cook-Sather, Bovill & Felten 2014). The documentation that seeks to guide those establishing partnerships in learning and teaching (e.g.: QAA 2012 ; NUS 2012 ; HEA 2014) outlines the values that support effective partnership (such as trust, openness, shared responsibilities, empowerment) and recent research reveals how the values of partnership are played out in practice (Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017). As Healey, Flint and Harrington note, however, “partnership is multi-faceted and has a number of different meanings and purposes dependent on context” (2014, p. 24). We argue that corpusbased methods can support the formulation of context-specific definitions of partnership by challenging people to reflect on what partnership is, who is involved, and how partnership differs from other ways in which staff and students work together in a particular setting.