This paper describes a student-faculty partnership that took place in a context of curricular co-creation. Through qualitative analysis of reflections written by both instructors and students, the authors track participants' perceptions throughout the course of a curriculum design module. This process is characterised by the emergence of ownership and resilience in students, which coincided with an increase in frequency of themes that signalled student frustration and instructor vulnerability. Implications of these findings for student and faculty development are discussed in several different contexts of student-faculty partnerships.