Peer Learning - the free association of adults in a learner shaped environment
From the outset of attempts to promote peer learning, tough, open, honest confrontation was the norm to be aimed at. Central to all this is the primacy of the individual and their experience. Conjoint inquiry, mutuality, interdependence, these are all terms to describe this essential, shared element to working with individual potential and human experience.
The vigour of a peer learning group depends upon visibility, choice and collaboration.
1. Visibility. Peer learning depends upon individual participation: participation in identifying and expressing one’s own learning needs and preferences. They must find what it is like to hold their own space, become recognised and acknowledged by their colleagues, as well as become willing to engage in and with the differences that are inevitably revealed.
2. Choice.It is through the examination of choices and how they influence one’s opportunities that many participants begin to recognise that they only choose at a very rudimentary level. ‘Choosing’ can, however, be based on a deep recognition of individual needs and preferences, with an openness and willingness to revise choices in the light of the information that is revealed as others declare their choices.
3. Collaboration. Collaboration inevitably depends upon the degree to which a person can manage working with the preconditions of visibility and choice. Unless a peer group actively seeks to examine its own life, it quickly, like any other group, develops recognised formations of pairings and sub-groupings. This results in limiting creativity and experimentation, reducing opportunities for group members to engage with each other and begins to replicate the features of group life in more traditional settings. Collaboration takes time but when people work strongly together, though they do not all get all their needs met all the time, they all know that their needs have been recognised and taken into account in the process that is agreed, and a process is not agreed until it is agreed by all.
The Peer Principle acknowledges that individuals stand more properly in relation to one another as colleagues, and work from a basis of mutuality and challenge – that includes conflict and opposition as well as joint problem solving. The relationship of peers is one to which we aspire in our dealings with others.
Peer learning begins with an account of what makes an educated person – simply put it might go something like:
‘An individual able to make aware choices; choices that include some degree of recognition for their implications upon self and others and takes these into account; someone self-motivated and not operating out of a slavish adherence to unexamined cultural or social norms; someone able to recognise areas of their own functioning that are distress influenced and who can take responsibility to attend to them using appropriate help.’
This is an ideal to be sure, but one that firmly sets the learner at the heart of the learning. It ensures the learning is in the hands of the learner and that the learner has a right to influence the learning that involves them. This is crucial because it requires much more than a person’s intellectual capacity in order to learn. The peer method of learning will always recognise the affective as well as the cognitive component of any learning, and will be much more attentive to healing the patterns of interruption that influence individuals and inhibit them from being able to participate fully in their learning and its evolution.
A central tenet of peer learning in ‘practice’ is that experience, skills, theory and practice itself are all elements that live within the developing practitioner, as reflected in the ‘self as instrument’ concept. Practice-based activities, founded on demonstrable performance, are highly suited to participative and experiential methods and are preferable over instruction or discussion. (No-one learns to swim looking at diagrams on a board – though they may help improve one’s stroke at some stage.)
