Just published – together with two great colleagues – an article on peer mentoring in the Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change.

Abstract

This paper explores how to facilitate the ‘bedding in’ and ‘becoming of’ undergraduate students who come from non-traditional backgrounds and struggle with what is, for them, the often alien world of academic writing and assessment.  To achieve their aims, the authors set up a partnership between the students of a second-year Peer Mentoring module and those of a first-year Becoming an Educationalist one.  By means of this creative partnering, and via reflective blog entries, they worked to harness quasi-academic writing to help such first-year students to become familiar with, and powerful within, the exclusionary practices (in particular, the written conventions of academic essays) of Higher Education.  They argue that this innovative ‘teaming-up’ of second- and first-year students not only models collaborative learning and writing practice, but also facilitates the ‘bedding-in’ of newcomers.  The paper itself models the partnership and creative writing methods used to help students find their ‘voice’ by being ‘co-produced’ by the people teaching across the two modules concerned.

Read the full article here.