Lessons Learned from a Near-Symmetrical North‒South Student Exchange/ International Service-Learning University Partnership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reports on an interview-based assessment of the eight-year experience of a North‒South university partnership between a Canadian university and three universities in a Sub-Saharan African country. The partnership concerned an asymmetrical student exchange program whereby southern graduate students traveled north to study while northern undergraduates traveled south to perform international service-learning internships. Unlike conventional partnerships that tend to be hierarchical and one-way, the article finds this partnership demonstrated characteristics of Koehn and Obamba’s (2014) “near symmetrical partnership” in which partners consider the relationship reasonably balanced despite acknowledging enduring power imbalances. The article identifies four factors that appear to have contributed to this near-symmetrical status: the asymmetrical nature of the student exchange program; reliance on thick ties between a small number of key actors, including a boundary spanner; deliberate efforts to counter the imbalance; and positive effects of funder regulations. The conclusion presents recommendations for funders and university partners.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".