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. IntroductionThe Victoria University (VU) Student Rover program is an on-campus workplacelearning program in which mobile peer mentors are employed to provide 'just-intime' and 'just-in-place' learning support to other students within the university's Learning Commons. As part of the broader shift in higher education 'away from a teaching culture and towards a culture of learning' (Bennett, 2005, p. 10), many academic libraries have been progressively reframed firstly as 'information commons' and later 'Learning Commons'. One of the key elements in this second transitionfrom information to learning commons -has been an increasing focus on learners and learning rather than simply the successful provision of information or resources. This shift has also occurred in line with a global trend aimed at repositioning university libraries in an era of ubiquitous access to online information and materials, so that they

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This chapter explores the human element in the learning space through the notion that once a learning space is inhabited, it becomes a learning place of agency, purpose and community involving both staff and students. The School of Languages and Learning at Victoria University in Melbourne has initiated a multifaceted peer learning support strategy, ‘Students Supporting Student Learning’ (SSSL), involving the deployment of student peer mentors into various physical and virtual learning spaces. The chapter discusses the dynamics of peer learning across these learning space settings and the challenges involved in instituting the shift from teacher- to learning-centred pedagogies within such spaces. Both physical and virtual dimensions are considered, with the SNAPVU Platform introduced as a strategy for facilitating virtual learning communities of practice in which staff, mentors, and students will be able to engage in mutual learning support. The chapter concludes with calls for the explicit inclusion of peer learning in the operational design of learning spaces.

If you do not wish to construe philosophical discourse as simply a discourse of cognition, a theoretical discourse; if you think it is also a practical, ethical discourse: how should you write? How should you frame the ethos, the authority of your discourse? This article re-presents an extended preface I wrote and rewrote obsessively over a period of nearly two years in an effort to forge a voice and mode of address adequate to my sense of philosophical discourse as a practical discourse, whilst also being accountable to the generic requirements of a PhD. As the textual record of this struggle, the value of this text must remain primarily in its capacity to evoke or provoke similar generic memories or ambitions in the reader.

This rhetorical contest was originally written and performed in 2002 to awaken adult literacy practitioners to the forgotten history of rhetorically-based language pedagogy, a pedagogy that still functions as the repressed unconscious of many modern approaches. Recently it has been re-staged at three linguistics conferences. The performance stages a mock court trial, a key rhetorical contest, in which two protagonists interpret a text by Nelson Mandela. One protagonist is leading contemporary linguist from the so-called 'Sydney School', Professor Jim Martin; the other is Quintilian, holder of the first Roman chair of Rhetoric. It is hoped that re-staging this contest at linguistics conferences may perhaps pique enough interest for linguists to re-examine this largely forgotten, but vibrant tradition of language study and pedagogy.