At the end of the last trail, two phrases were sitting uncomfortably close together.
Critical companion.
Travel Companion.
One came from Angie Titchen’s work in healthcare practice development.
The other appeared years later in Keith Lyons’ writing about accompanying high-performance coaches’ learning.
The resemblance is difficult not to notice.
It is also where this journey could become much too neat.
A paper in Keith’s Critical Friend material cites Titchen.
Titchen developed critical companionship.
In 2017 Keith called himself a Travel Companion.
Put those facts in a line and a story almost writes itself.
The trouble is that the middle of the story is missing.
There is no evidence that Keith followed the citation.
No evidence that he read Titchen.
No evidence that the phrase Travel Companion came from critical companionship.
A route between documents is not a route through somebody’s thinking.
So the comparison has to do a different job.
We can put the two bodies of work beside one another and ask what each makes easier to notice in the other.
Titchen gives companion an explicit architecture. Critical companionship is a developed framework around accompaniment, challenge, support, learning from practice and a relationship that is intentionally entered and eventually left.
Keith reached his wording by a visible route of his own.
Years before he used Travel Companion, he had been writing about coaches’ personal learning journeys. In 2016, describing work supported by Kevin Bowring, he called the project one of following coaches’ learning journeys as a critical friend. In February 2017, two chairs beside a rugby pitch sharpened his sense that those sharing a coach’s learning journey should be “beside them and with them”.
Then, after a month travelling around England visiting coaches, he changed the way he described his own place in that work.
He moved away from coach developer and mentor.
He chose Travel Companion. (Lyons, 2017)
The existing Travel Companion reconstruction makes an important point about the grammar of that move.
They were the coaches’ personal learning journeys.
Travel Companion was Keith’s attempt to describe his own place in relation to them.
That is a resemblance worth keeping.
Neither account begins by making the experienced person the owner of the journey.
But the difference matters just as much.
Titchen built a framework.
Keith did not.
His surviving language leaves the position moving: leading, following, guiding, meddling, sometimes simply being on the bus.
The wider Clyde Street naming trail also remained unsettled. What Do You Call Someone Who Helps a Coach Learn? shows Keith trying different names as different parts of the work came into view.
So we should not borrow Titchen’s vocabulary to finish Keith’s sentence for him.
Nor should we make Keith’s later wording evidence that the two traditions had met.
The legitimate comparison is smaller.
In different places, for different purposes, both bodies of work were wrestling with a related problem:
How can one person contribute substantially to another person’s learning without quietly taking possession of it?
Titchen answered by building a framework around accompaniment.
Keith kept changing the name and position of the person alongside.
One codified the relationship.
The other left the relationship unfinished in the archive.
That changes what we should ask next.
Perhaps the interesting question is no longer where Keith found the word companion.
We may never know.
The better question is what had to happen for the word to become more than a self-description.
The Travel Companion piece had already left that possibility open before this new trail began:
Was Travel Companion really a relationship?
References
Titchen, A. (2003) ‘Critical companionship: Part 1’, Nursing Standard, 18(9), pp. 33–40. doi:10.7748/ns2003.11.18.9.33.c3502. PubMed record.
Lyons, K. (2016) ‘Kevin’, Clyde Street, 29 June. Original post.
Lyons, K. (2017) ‘#coachlearninginsport: besides and with’, Clyde Street, 5 February. Original post.
Lyons, K. (2017) ‘Travel Companion 1’, Clyde Street, 27 April. Original post.