This article uses examples from interviews with research students to show how the provision of a rich environment is not in itself sufficient. A new discourse is needed so that students are able to take up opportunities that are available. The article questions the current emphasis and argues that a new focus on pedagogy is explicitly needed. It challenges the dominant focus on supervision and ‘provisionism’ and suggests that a more appropriate pedagogic discourse should draw on the familiar notion of ‘peer’ from the world of research. It argues that peer learning, appropriately theorized and situated within a notion of communities of research practice, might be a productive frame through which to view research education. p. 1

The term ‘research education’ that we use here is being increasingly adopted in Australia as a sign that what had been called postgraduate research has an explicitly educational character. This is in deliberate contrast to a government articulated discourse around ‘research training’. In turn, both of these position research education/training in distinction to ‘research’. There remains, however, a lack of a strong public discourse of pedagogy for research education, particularly one which accounts for the growing size, complexity and pressure for change experienced by the higher education sector in recent times. Green and Lee (1995) noted a conceptual subordination of questions of learning and teaching to those of research in research education. More recently, Pearson (1999), citing Becher et al. (1994) in the UK and Clark (1992) in the USA, noted a continuing privileging of a discourse of research over learning in public policy and academic debate alike. p. 2

Rather than seeing these complex and dispersed relations in terms of an ‘environment’ which is separate and apart from ‘pedagogy’, understood primarily in ‘vertical’ terms as ‘supervision’, we suggest that pedagogy be reconceptualized as significantly ‘distributed’ and ‘horizontalized’, with an associated dispersal of p. 2

responsibilities and of agency. We use the notion of ‘distributed’ learning in the sense used by Lea and Nicoll (2002), to refer to networks of learning in which learners take up opportunities in a variety of ways without necessary involvement from teachers or supervisors. p. 3

In higher education generally, an emphasis on students learning with and from each other has been one of the key trends over the past 20 years. Various descriptions and practices have been used. Peer group learning (Collier, 1983), collaborative learning (Bruffee, 1999), cooperative learning (Mills & Cottell, 1998) and peer tutoring (Falchikov, 2001) all encompass the idea that in undergraduate education there is considerable educational benefit in students working with each other, often apart from teachers, to teach and to learn from each other. One of the influences driving peer learning initiatives was a concern that graduates were not developing the important skills of working together desired by employers. As enterprises needed the production of graduates effective in teams, universities responded at first slowly and then more positively in identifying ‘working together’ as a key ‘graduate attribute’ and began actively fostering activities that promoted this across the disciplines (Boud et al., 2001). p. 9

Peer learning, therefore, which started as an initiative of students to cope with an unsupportive teaching regime, became increasingly systematized as a pedagogical technology initiated by teachers. It helped them cope with a need to be student-centred in courses at a time when this could not be achieved by conventional teaching practices. p. 9

References p. 16

Lea, M. R. & Nicoll, K. (Eds) (2002) Distributed learning: social and cultural approaches to practice (London, Routledge). p. 16