Power, tokenism or non-participation with peer assisted learning – the choice is yours!

Abstract

This workshop will showcase examples of students as partners from Bournemouth University’s Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) scheme. These will be reviewed against the recent HEA report Engagement Through Partnership: Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Healy, Flint and Harrison, 2014). The workshop will engage participants by using audience response technology to enable participants to reflect on the degree of participation for different case studies of student engagement with PAL at Bournemouth University, and will map them against the four areas of participation identified by the report: Learning, teaching and assessment This will focus on students reflecting on their development as PAL Leaders through portfolios for BU’s Student Development Award. It will describe typical peer learning activities and the transformative learning that PAL Leaders gain from facilitating the sessions. Subject-based research and inquiry This will outline a student co-creation project that employed media school students to create films researching different aspects of PAL. As well as promoting understanding of PAL, the students producing the films have used them to secure work placements. Scholarship of teaching and learning This case study will focus on student PAL Leaders attending the National Leader conference. It will showcase the students’ presentation at the conference and their feedback on the experience. Curriculum design and pedagogic consultancy This case study will describe a pilot to employ ex-PAL Leaders to help run the scheme by supporting current Leaders. There is potential for suggestions to feed into the on-going development of the programme.