Team Reflection: Balancing Different Perspectives to Create Change 

This past year, the Innovation Hub partnered with the Office of the Vice Provost Students (OVPS) to explore the relationship between student leaders and university staff. In this blog, the Supporting Student Leaders team reflects on their experience connecting with students and staff, as well as the strategies they identified to navigate the balance between those different perspectives. 

Written by the Supporting Student Leaders to Create Change team 

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While working on the Supporting Student Leaders to Create Change project, we learned that there are many sides to every story and that the topic of student leaders creating change involves many different perspectives. At the end of the term, something that stayed with us was the emotional labour that students do when they listen to the needs of the student body. Perhaps Ali, a data-driven fictional persona of a student leader (based on real data from our project), said it best: “As a leader, my job is to professionally communicate the needs and concerns of my peers. But even though I try to focus on representing students’ lived experiences without getting too emotionally involved, it’s hard to keep my feelings at arm’s length.” Both student leaders and staff carry the emotional burden of listening to student stories while trying to ensure those students can access the right support.  

Student leaders and the staff who support them want to create changes that empower the students they serve. The motivation that student leaders and staff have to create change, even while navigating the university’s complex systems, gives us hope for the future. 

Exploring the Partnership Between Staff and Students 

Exploring both the student and staff experiences was a challenge because we found our biases emerging at times. With students who have been student leaders previously and students who have never engaged in student governance on the team, our individual experiences had an influence on the way we each interpreted the data. While some of the team members were already aware of the challenges and successes of student leaders, others were gaining insight into experiences they had never encountered before.  

Rhonda: As a fellow student, I found myself resonating with the experiences of student leaders. I was touched by their hard work and passion for creating change on campus. It was particularly hard emotionally to listen to some difficult experiences that student leaders had. Similarly to their dedication to representing students, I wanted to represent them accurately in our results. This was difficult given that much of our project highlighted both student leaders and staff perspectives.

Despite the challenge, working through those tough yet important conversations were worthwhile. They ultimately sparked a shared passion for creating change, one where we contributed through our design research. By understanding staff experiences, we were able to understand student experiences from a different perspective. 

Capturing Interconnected Experiences 

Part of capturing the stories of both students and staff is how we narrate this partnership and explain how interconnected their experiences are. As we were crafting the story and putting the pieces together, wherever we talked about student experiences, we made sure that we talked about staff experiences as well. This helped ensure that the connection between perspectives is accurate and respectfully illustrated. We found that this process required us to look back at the data of both students and staff to find stories that stood out. As a team, we mapped student experiences to staff’s to find the where in their partnership were there areas that were working well and areas that were challenging.  

Max: Throughout the project, I listened to both staff and students about their experiences in student governance. I could feel the passion and commitment from each side, while also noticing moments where misunderstandings surfaced. Hearing their honest stories helped me begin to connect the dots and better understand how we might support stronger relationships between them. As I reflected on these perspectives, I felt motivated to build a story that honors both experiences. It became important to me that each side feels seen, heard, and understood by the other, with the hope of inspiring meaningful change.

By thoroughly analyzing and interpreting the data, we crafted a narrative that bridges these diverse experiences. This narrative emphasizes the shared moments within their journeys, highlighting the points they navigate together despite their differences. 

Learning About Changemaking Changed Us  

We were inspired by how motivated both students and staff were in creating impactful change on campus for students. We were then motivated to find the needs that resonated with students and staff. This allowed us to uncover insights that brought a new understanding to already known issues. Being open to multiple interpretations of the data enabled us to arrive at meaningful findings with the potential to drive change. One discovery that stood out to us was that both students and staff are striving toward the same goals but approach them differently. Our experience learning about campus changemakers felt meaningful, as it highlighted their challenging journey and the real impact that these dedicated individuals can have in driving positive change. 

Faiza: I’ve seen the different sides of student leaders and their dedication to campus life, here at the university, it felt like seeing the behind the scenes into the action that makes up campus life. I learnt about the makings of a leader and how they balance life, school, and their duties in their daily lives. I got to hear students envision the future of student governance and their hopes for the next leaders. This project helped me understand the university on a larger scale as I watched all the moving parts play a role in building community and a new appreciation for the leaders and university as a whole.

Fostering Open Conversations to Create Trust

Working on the Supporting Student Leaders to Create Change project this year at the Innovation Hub gave us the opportunity to understand the reflections and align the needs of different stakeholders. By fostering open conversation about bias, synthesizing insights from multiple perspectives, and crafting a narrative aimed at enhancing changemaker collaboration, our mission as researchers has developed into something more. We now feel like changemakers ourselves, driven to share insights that would inspire change. 

In order to create meaningful change for students’ experience in leadership positions at university, it benefits everyone involved to consider the experience of staff as well. We hope that this project encourages student leaders, staff, and the greater community to navigate collegial relationships with greater empathy and commit to creating change together. 

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Contributors