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.