Co-production: useful for collecting rubbish, and for teaching!

There's an interesting article in the most recent issue Studies in Higher Education called 'The student as co-producer: learning from public administration about the student-university relationship' (Alistair McCulloch, Vol. 34, No. 2, March 2009, 171–183). McCulloch proposes that we start describing students as 'co-producers' rather than as 'consumers'. He gives a nice account of the history of the 'consumer model', and its appeal, before (rather convincingly) tearing it to shreds, drawing on McMillan and Cheney's 1996 article, 'The student as consumer: The implications and limitations of a metaphor' (Communication Education, vol. 45, No. 1, 1–15).

In place of the 'consumer model' he proposes 'co-production', which describes

a situation in which public services, which by definition involve the provision of public goods, are provided jointly by paid public sector actors with the voluntary involvement of the private actors who enjoy the output of the coproduction process (175).

Co-production was first applied to domestic waste collection (nobody pays you to wheel your bin to the curb once a week, you just do it because you benefit from 'the output of the coproduction process'). 'Curbside' rubbish collection was only introduced in the USA in the 1970s, and co-production was theorised based on this model (worryingly, one of the 'benefits' was that the city could reduce its rubbish-collection staff, but let's not dwell on that).

McCulloch plucks this concept from its unglamorous context and tries it out as a model for the student's role in higher education, leading to this rather stirring assertion:

If it is acknowledged that both teachers and students are engaged in the activity of knowledge development, dissemination and application, then the current wide gap between teaching and research begins to narrow and, for the undergraduate, learning involves explicit engagement with knowledge and the processes by which it is produced. For the university and the individual academic, it helps to bring a greater degree of consonance between, respectively, the various elements of mission and role (178).

I couldn't agree more. I'm going to stop lifting quotes from his article now, and recommend that you read it in its entirety.