Bottom-up Student Engagement Associate (SEA) schemes allow for the development of both student and staff partners in a unique and collaborative way (Obadare et al., 2022). This academic development (AD) approach is based on the seminal paper by Cook-Sather et al. (2014) on the Scholarship of Students as Equal Partners (SEP) and serves as a viable means of increasing the drive for educational transformation (Dunne & Zandstra, 2011). Unlike UK and USA universities, bottom-up academic development schemes at the University of Crete started in 2019 with the Training of the trainers (TotT) initiative in which teaching staff and senior faculty collaborated as equal partners in AD schemes. Since then, the very notion of “bottom-up” initiatives evolved including students as co-researchers in the design of a MOOC on “Higher Education Pedagogy: Teaching Methodologies in Tertiary Education” tailored to academics needs (Katsampoxaki-Hodgetts et al., 2023, Katsampoxaki-Hodgetts, 2023a,b). To further increase the drive for transformational teaching and learning, this paper presents a new initiative which aims to explore student and academics’ beliefs regarding the design of SEP schemes and their employability as reliable bottom-up AD Schemes at the University of Crete. Twenty professors and 65 students submitted questionnaires regarding the feasibility, the challenges and the steps to be taken for such a scheme to be successfully employed by university teachers or academics. Following a course whose one of its main priorities was to encourage student engagement in course instructional design and assessment decision making, ten semi-structured student interviews were conducted in order to provide qualitative data towards the aforementioned issues. Ten academics were also interviewed. Data analysis was conducted using grounded theory and thematic analysis of open-ended questions and interview responses (Charmaz, 2008; Tuckett, 2005). Findings highlighted the main reasons why students and teachers may not be willing to engage in such schemes, how to overcome potential challenges and what steps should be taken before implementing SEA as Academic Development Schemes. The overlap between teachers and students’ initial views was expected due to the established cultural realities underpinning university teaching and learning. Yet, after the course completion, students offered key perspectives regarding inclusive teaching and provided realistic ways of engaging students in SEA developmental and pedagogical innovation schemes. Students’ perspectives can transform teacher beliefs about teaching and assessment provided this process is perceived as “doing with rather than doing to” students so as to ensure equity (O’Shea, 2018, pp 18).

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