What Are We to Each Other? How Practitioners Make Sense of Relationships with Peer Educators

Peer educators, central to the work we do in academic support and more broadly in higher education, have deep impacts on student learning, development, and success. The ways that academic support professionals in the field make sense of their relationships with peer educators can impact the structure, function, and efficacy of support programs and services. This exploratory project provides the first empirical study that attempts to understand how professionals conceptualize their relationships with peer educators. Based on an expansive survey deployed across Canada and the United States, key findings include an inconsistent lexicon, a complex set of power dynamics, and an array of unacknowledged assumptions about these relationships. A critical examination of these power dynamics and assumptions may help practitioners further enhance their programming.