Empowering community-based learning in nutrition through student co-production of an ethnographic assessment resource

Community-based learning facilitates localised application of theoretical concepts. Use of this approach in assessment is challenged by student perceptions of barriers to civic engagement. To support students on a nutrition course to undertake a community-based assessment on social food movements, we developed a student partnership, recruiting a student to undertake 13 ethnographic visits to scrutinise the task. This provided practical insights for the teaching team and the co-production of the Social Food Guide, a resource supporting students to navigate unfamiliar community spaces through paths paved by the student partner. The co-produced resource supported critical conscientisation of three cohorts taking the assessment. The student partnership was valuable in giving future cohorts the agency to navigate, access, and learn from community spaces, generating novel opportunities to explore careers in evolving practice arenas. Embracing student partnership to co-produce the assessment initiated a practice turn in our teaching team, in which we envisioned student co-production as a useful tool of inquiry for democratising the design of assessments.