In this presentation, I discuss the opportunities of “Students as Partners” (SaP) projects to redesign, evaluate, and/ or otherwise improve classroom engagements of the Islamic past. I root this discussion in my experience as the faculty partner of a SaP project that resigned an ‘Abbāsid history course at a Canadian university. My two student partners and I were interested in two key research questions for this project: (1) what is the student experience of diversity and cultural learning in this course and in what ways can we support students across different positionalities and experiences? (2) What pedagogical interventions can we include or modify to support students across different disciplinary backgrounds as they engage the Islamic past, often for the first time? To address these questions, our project analyzed student feedback from the original course cohort and redesigned the course through a SaP approach—a pedagogical method in which the student partners collaborate equally with the faculty member and contribute their own valuable sets of expertise to the project and in which all decision-making is achieved collectively. We then evaluated the impact and success of our interventions based on feedback and survey data from the student experience of the redesigned course. This presentation will summarize our collective pedagogical interventions, evaluate the results of our project, and offer some reflections on our respective experiences of the SaP approach. In doing so, I argue that “Students as Partners” work is uniquely positioned to transform a classroom experience and is also poised to impact more than pedagogy. I argue that SaP is also a powerful, practical mentorship and professionalization tool for all partners involved, especially for those who may otherwise have limited access to such opportunities. The key issues and debates that this project raises have important implications for students and instructors who engage with Islamic history and the history of the MENA region. Firstly, this work takes seriously the intersection between pedagogy and research and positions collaborative pedagogical work as an important form of academic research and knowledge production. And secondly, our project demonstrates the importance of teaching cultural competence and sensitivity in and beyond the classroom, a powerful space for students who culturally identify with the Middle East to feel seen on campus and for students who do not culturally identify with the region to become more curious and invested in challenging harmful biases towards the Islamic past and present.