Using mobile peer mentors for student engagement: Student Rovers in the Learning Commons

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a 2010 evaluation of Victoria University's Student Rover program, an on-campus work-based learning program in which mobile student mentors are employed and deployed within the university's Learning Commons to provide ‘just-in-time’ and ‘just-in-place’ learning support to other students. Student Rovers are paid not to perform a quasi-staff role, but to be students who help other students learn and, in this process, to model both learning to learn and collaborative learning behaviours. Drawing on specific findings from a large-scale student survey, a small-scale staff survey and focus groups conducted with Student Rovers themselves relating to perceptions of the socio-institutional status of Student Rovers, the paper is concerned with exploring the anomalous nature of the Student Rover role and speculating as to the potential for change inherent within this situation. Reworking Billett's conceptualisation of co-participatory workplace practices, we propose that by framing the work of Student Rovers as ‘learningful’ workers operating within the liminal institutional contact zone between staff and students, the program may prove to be not simply a successful strategy for helping new students engage in campus life – while simultaneously preparing Student Rovers themselves for negotiating contemporary organisational circumstances of change, complexity and contingency – but also a precursor to an emergent, institutionally recognised, educational role of students paid to support the learning of other students.

Keywords:

• first-year experience
• institutional boundaries
• Learning Commons
• learningful work
• student learning support
• Student Rovers

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the generously detailed and extremely helpful responses of two anonymous reviewers for this journal. Their observations and suggestions enabled us to rework a fairly disjointed original text into what we hope is a more focused and coherent contribution.

Notes

1 The Student Rover program was developed separately and prior to the university's Work-Integrated Learning program, which frames its programs under the motto Students as Staff. This framing is at odds with that of the Student Rover program and other Student Peer Mentoring programs, which involve students as students helping other students learn.

2 These competing conceptions and underlying anxieties were also manifest in tensions concerning how Student Rovers were to be ‘placed’ in the social and physical space of the Learning Commons. See Kirkwood, Best, McCormack, and Tout (2010) for a more detailed treatment of this issue.

3 It is important to note that Student Rovers are not providing ‘help of last resort’; they do not replace existing trained librarians, learning support staff or IT staff, to whom they can and do refer any queries they do not feel able to address themselves. In fact, an important element of the work of Student Rovers is to develop sufficient practical judgement to know when to pass a query on to a trained expert.

4 If student contributions are seen as part of the legitimate educative work of the university, why should they not be paid? As many Student Rovers have insisted to us over the years, pay is more important as a symbol of recognition than an incentive for employment in the first place. Thus, most Student Rovers insist that they would be happy to be a Rover, pay or no pay, but that being paid legitimises their work as valuable to the university. This has certainly been the experience with the university's Student Peer Mentoring programs, which have only recently shifted from a voluntary to a paid model of student employment with no noticeable shift in students’ level of interest or commitment outside their appreciation that their work is being recognised by the university.