By Bo Kelestyn
Lessons from working and publishing with students
In higher education (HE), we often ask students for feedback after the most important decisions have already been made. We ask whether a module worked, whether an event was useful, whether a policy was clear, or whether an initiative landed well. These questions matter. But they also reveal a limitation: students are often invited to evaluate their experience largely designed by others.
Co-creation begins from a different premise. It asks what might happen if students were involved earlier, not only as respondents or representatives, but as people capable of framing problems, imagining alternatives and producing knowledge about HE itself.
Through my work on Designing Together, a student-staff co-creation initiative focused on human-centred educational innovation, I have come to see co-creation not simply as a method for improving student experience, but as a practice of belonging, agency and shared authorship. When students help design, test, refine and communicate ideas, they are not only contributing to better educational provision. They are also experiencing what it means to be taken seriously as members of a learning community.
This matters because belonging is often treated as an outcome: something to be measured, improved or delivered through institutional interventions. But co-creation has taught me that belonging can also happen in the process itself. It can happen in a workshop, around a shared table, in a Padlet comment or Vevox word cloud, in an informal conversation, or in the moment when a student sees their idea shaping a project, publication or decision. Belonging is not only something universities design for students. It is something students and staff can shape together.
Four lessons have stayed with me.
1. Genuinely listen and “keep the door open”
Listening sounds simple, but in practice it requires intentional design. It is not enough to invite students into a room once, ask what they think, and consider the work done. Students need multiple ways to contribute, including ways that are informal, low-pressure and ongoing.
As a Director of Student Experience, I used Padlets and shared Teams spaces that allowed students to offer informal feedback, add ideas asynchronously and build on one another’s thoughts. This is a contrast to the often preferred surveys that make responses invisible once you click ‘submit’. I created a ‘Heard it on the Grapevine’ Padlet, for example, where students could post things they heard from other students and ‘fact check’ information about the programme, marks or policies before they become toxic rumours. As a Course Director, I set up small funds for student-led projects, signalling that ideas could move beyond discussion into action. As a lecturer, I carve out 10-15 minutes of ‘corridor time’ after teaching for informal conversations, creating space for trust, humour, uncertainty and relationship-building, all the things that rarely fit neatly into a student-staff liaison committee agenda, but often make meaningful collaboration possible.
Keeping the door open is important because students do not always know what they want to say at the exact moment we ask them. They may need time to reflect. They may want to see whether staff are genuinely listening before they speak candidly. They may have ideas that emerge only after a workshop, a conversation with peers, or an experience elsewhere in the university. Not to mention a whole spectrum of cultural differences, neurodiversity needs, and life circumstances that shape this too.
A human-centred approach to co-creation recognises this. It treats listening not as an event, but as an infrastructure: a set of habits, spaces and relationships that make it easier for students to keep contributing.
2. Think joyful and win-win
Co-creation should be serious in purpose, but it does not need to feel heavy. Some of my most generative student-staff work happened when the atmosphere was creative, welcoming and energising. Small details like music, colour, and good food matter. Using pens, cards, prompts and materials that invite people to think with their hands as well as their heads. Or designing activities that feel purposeful (intentionally low tech) but also enjoyable. And, importantly, choices that show we have paid attention. “Pizza for students” has become almost a shorthand for engagement, but it is worth asking students what would actually make a session feel welcoming. The answer may be different from what we assume. In one of the student-led projects, for example, we got crepes and bubble tea, instead of pizza and Coke, and University-branded teddies instead of the usual Amazon/Love2Shop vouchers. This fundamentally reshaped that student-staff dialogue.
Joy is not a superficial add-on. It changes the quality of participation. When students feel relaxed, curious and valued, they are more likely to take creative risks. They are more likely to move beyond complaint into possibility. They are more likely to feel that they have not just given something to the institution but taken something away for themselves.
This is why co-creation should be win-win. Students should leave with more than the feeling of having been consulted. They should develop confidence, language, networks and skills. Applying design thinking to co-creation helps to boost problem-solving, collaboration, communication, teamwork skills, and even sustainability competencies. Staff should also learn, not only about student experience, but also about their own assumptions and biases. Good co-creation is mutually developmental. It creates value for the project, for the students, for staff and for the wider learning community.
3. Asking “what do you need?” is not enough
One of the most important lessons I have learned is that simply asking students what they need, although an important question, does not always produce the most inclusive or imaginative outcomes. The same goes for staff. This is not because we do not know our own experiences. We do. But direct questions can put people on the spot. They can privilege those who are already confident, articulate or familiar with institutional language. They can also lead to familiar answers, repeated frustrations, or what can feel like a “moan fest”. Not because we like being negative, but because the format invites critique without necessarily creating the conditions for reimagining.
Human-centred design-led co-creation is powerful because it changes the nature of the conversation. Rather than asking students to arrive with fully formed solutions, it creates a process through which ideas can emerge. Design thinking and facilitation tools such as scenarios, mapping activities and prototyping exercises help us move from experience to insight, and then from insight to possibility. They also make participation more inclusive: no one has to have the perfect answer immediately, and ideas can be built collectively.
This is where co-creation becomes more than consultation. It allows students and staff to reframe the problem together. What I have observed is that sometimes what first appears to be a request for more information is actually a need for belonging. I learnt this from the work of Professor Radka Newton, who often cites Disney’s ‘What time is the 3 o’clock parade?’ thinking. Sometimes what sounds like a complaint about communication is really about trust. Sometimes the most useful idea appears halfway through an activity, sparked by someone else’s comment, a visual prompt or a moment of shared recognition.
Human-centred innovation depends on this kind of emergence. It does not assume that the problem is already known. It creates the conditions for better questions to surface.
4. Close the feedback loop. Then open it again
One of the quickest ways to damage trust in student-staff partnership is to ask for input and then disappear. Students need to know what happened next. What was changed? What was not changed? Why? What is still being explored? Where did their contributions go?
Closing the feedback loop is a known challenge, but we should not hide from it because it communicates mattering and respect. It shows that student labour has been recognised. It also helps students understand the complexity of institutional change: the constraints, trade-offs and timescales that are often invisible from the outside.
But co-creation should not be imagined as a neat linear process: ask-listen-act-report back-finish. It is better understood as a cycle. Communicate, share, update and ask again. Return to students with prototypes, drafts, early findings or emerging decisions. Invite them to challenge what has been interpreted from their contributions. Make visible where their ideas have shaped the work.
I find this cyclical approach is especially important when working and publishing with students. Authorship is not just about whose name appears on a paper or blog. It is about how ideas are generated, developed, represented and credited. Writing and publishing with students requires explicit conversations about roles, expectations, confidence, time and recognition. It also requires care. Academic writing can be unfamiliar and intimidating, but it can also be a powerful site of belonging when students see that their experiences and interpretations are part of knowledge production.
In this sense, co-creation is not only a way of designing better educational initiatives. It is a way of changing the relationships through which HE understands itself. For me, the central lesson in projects like Designing Together is that students do not only belong in the university as learners, consumers or sources of feedback. They belong as thinkers, makers, collaborators and authors. When we create the conditions for genuine co-creation, we invite students to help shape the educational futures they are part of. If we believe those futures are to serve our students, we should be designing with, not for or to.
From the work of Susie Wise, we know that invitation is a moment of belonging and must be designed with care. It needs open doors, joyful spaces, inclusive methods and honest feedback loops. It needs staff who are willing to listen without defensiveness, share power without abandoning responsibility, and treat student insight as knowledge rather than anecdote, or worse, “a storm in a teacup”.
Co-creation will not solve every challenge in HE. But it can help us practise a more human-centred form of innovation: one rooted in relationship, imagination and shared purpose. Perhaps its greatest promise is not simply that it helps students feel they belong. It is that it invites us all to help make our universities places worth belonging to.
Dr Bo Kelestyn PFHEA FEEUK is an Associate Professor at Warwick Business School, where she teaches and researches at the intersection of design thinking, education, and digital innovation.