Fulbright Takes Cook-Sather to Ireland in Support of Educational Partnerships

Professor of Education Studies Alison Cook-Sather has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award to spend three months in Ireland. Cook-Sather’s project, "Building a Country-wide Infrastructure for Pedagogical Partnership and Co-creation," focuses on co-designing structures and approaches to support the development and implementation of pedagogical partnership and co-creation approaches across the Irish higher education sector.  

During the spring semester of 2027, Cook-Sather will offer regional workshops and conduct site visits at University College Dublin, Maynooth University, University of Limerick, Atlantic Technological University, and University College Cork. 

She will then develop recommendations to help Ireland’s Higher Education Authority (HEA) and individual institutions strengthen student engagement, success, and well-being through collaborative approaches to teaching and learning. 

This project builds on Cook-Sather’s decades-long international leadership in the development of pedagogical partnership and co-creation approaches and her more recent relationship with the HEA and several higher-education institutions in Ireland.  

Since 2024, Cook-Sather has served on the HEA's Student Engagement and Teaching and Learning (SETL) Committee, which comprises members of the HEA, representatives from diverse higher education institutions, and international experts. SETL advises and makes recommendations concerning student engagement and teaching and learning development across the higher education sector.  

From 2024–2025, Cook-Sather also served on the Fellowship Board as an advisor to the Engagement through Partnership: Students as Partners in Teaching & Learning scheme at Ireland's largest university, University College Dublin (UCD). This scheme funds fellowships as part of UCD's institutional development structure to encourage academic staff to focus on advancing university-wide enhancement in teaching and learning through strategic policy-focused or practice-based research. 

"Ireland is a particularly exciting context in which to develop pedagogical partnership and co-creation approaches because the HEA has a unified, equity-focused vision and individual institutions are already engaged in this work," Cook-Sather explains. "They are eager to take these efforts to the next level."

Cook-Sather has consulted on pedagogical partnership and co-creation work at nearly 100 institutions in 15 countries and published numerous scholarly articles and books, some co-authored with Bryn Mawr and Haverford students, including Pedagogical Partnerships: A How-To Guide for Faculty, Students, and Academic Developers in Higher Education, and the forthcoming Enacting Whole-Class Co-creation: Faculty and Student Experiences and Perspectives. 

As part of her Fulbright, Cook-Sather will gather stories from students, faculty, staff, and administrators about how engaging in pedagogical partnership and co-creation changes participants' understanding of education more broadly. These stories will be collected in a volume tentatively titled The Transformative Potential of Pedagogical Partnership and Co-Creation: Stories of Changing Ways of Working across the Irish Higher Education Sector. 

"In preparing to submit my Fulbright application," Cook-Sather notes, "I spoke with colleagues across the sector, and a consistent theme I heard was the desire to gather examples of and stories about this work across contexts. Including student voices, in particular, in wider conversations about pedagogical partnership and co-creation builds on my ongoing commitment and efforts in this area."  

Cook-Sather is the Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor of Education at Bryn Mawr College and director of the Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges.