Reflecting on vulnerability, skill-building, and identity in an interdisciplinary SaP project

Launched in 2021 by a team of undergraduate students, university faculty, associate researchers, and community partners collaborating as genuine equals in a diverse team, the Together Time Story Sacks intergenerational literacies program forms part of an ongoing action research project aimed at understanding and addressing barriers that residents of rural regions face in accessing literacies programming. In this paper, six team members who co-imagined, co-designed and co-implemented Together Time but occupy different roles on and beyond university campuses reflect on the ways the students-as-partners (SaP) model, through which we brought Together Time to life, shaped both our process and our outputs during the project’s pilot phase (September 2021–August 2022). We suggest that empowering humans with diverse academic and lived experiences through the SaP model is an Invigorating, messy, and, at times, nerve-racking process but an eminently fruitful enterprise that, in our opinion, produces rich research with and for our community while transforming our understanding of education and ourselves.