Which way was the learning travelling?
It sounds like an easy question until the relationship lasts long enough.
A critical friend helps somebody else reflect.
A companion travels alongside somebody else's learning.
An experienced person brings another lens.
The grammar points in one direction.
But Clyde Street keeps turning the arrows around.
A small clue appears before Keith Lyons ever used the phrase Travel Companion.
In June 2016 he wrote about Kevin Bowring, a friend of almost forty years who had supported the coach-learning project Keith had proposed. Keith described that project as following coaches' learning journeys as a critical friend.
Then he added something else.
He hoped he could continue his own learning journey with Kevin too.
That does not make Kevin Keith's Travel Companion.
It does something more useful.
It stops the project being read as though learning belonged only to the coaches while Keith stood outside it as the developed person helping everybody else develop.
Keith was travelling too.
The coaches themselves could turn the direction around.
When Keith became overly romantic about their coaching, they could tell him so.
When he offered support, they could decline it.
When he watched their work, he remained capable of being surprised by what he encountered.
Reciprocity here does not mean everybody occupied the same role.
Keith still arrived with experience, questions, relationships and a particular responsibility in the project.
The point is simpler:
contribution did not travel in only one direction.
There is one Clyde Street relationship where that movement is especially visible because both sides of the exchange survive.
Long before this critical-friendship inquiry, Beyond the Breadcrumbs reconstructed it as A Conversation That Kept Moving.
It follows Keith's public exchange with me across years of questions, links, comments, experiments, invitations and shared work.
The value of that record is not that it lets me retrospectively call either of us the other's critical friend or Travel Companion.
It does not.
Its value is that we can sometimes see what one person did, what the other person did with it, and what happened when something came back.
In 2012, for example, questions I asked Keith about blogging led him to make a practice he had inhabited for years more explicit. The questions did not supply his answer. They created a reason for him to articulate one. He continued working on the subject after the initial exchange, moving from his own blogging practice towards questions about networks and scholarly legitimacy.
The movement was already recursive.
A question changed what Keith attended to.
Keith's response changed what became available for the next conversation.
In 2013 the direction changed again. A question about whether applied performance analysts actually used statistical tests sent Keith back into his own professional history. He revisited a 1998 presentation, methodological choices and the way he had framed validity and evidence.
I did not give Keith a new methodology.
The prompt made an older one available for re-examination.
The archive was still his.
The disturbance came from elsewhere.
By 2014 the relationship becomes even harder to describe as experienced scholar helping younger practitioner.
Keith visited Cardiff and wrote about what he was learning from the environment Adam Cullinane and I had been building. He arrived with deep history in the Centre for Performance Analysis and ideas of his own. He also made our infrastructure, teaching and experimentation objects of his learning. His Cardiff post is unusually explicit about that curiosity.
The roles had not simply reversed.
That would be too tidy.
Experience remained uneven.
History remained uneven.
Different people knew different things.
But the direction of learning was no longer fixed.
The clearest loop appears in 2015 around the open course #UCSIA15.
Keith helped create the environment and invited participation.
He commented on reflections and supplied openings.
I wrote through what those prompts were changing for me.
Then those reflections travelled back to Keith.
He said directly that they had helped him think about sharing and learning. In #UCSIA15 Connections, he used those reflections while reconsidering his own balance between openness and scaffolding in the course.
The loop is unusually inspectable:
Keith created and invited.
I reflected and wrote.
The writing returned.
Keith learned from it and changed what he wrote next.
There is no need to decide who influenced whom more.
That would miss the interesting part.
The relationship could preserve unequal experience and still allow the next useful contribution to originate from either side.
Later that year Keith gave one part of this function a name.
Writing about Mark Upton, he described me as an 'assiduous connector' and a companion to Mark in his thinking about performance. Recommendations, he said, regularly took him away on journeys of discovery.
Again, that should not be inflated into a formal role.
It is more interesting as evidence of position changing.
The person Keith had encouraged could become the person who opened a route for Keith.
The person asking a question could later become someone whose practice Keith watched.
A response could become a prompt.
An invitation could produce work that returned to alter the inviter's thinking.
This is where Angie Titchen's idea of reciprocity becomes useful as a lens but dangerous as a label.
Titchen makes giving and receiving part of critical companionship.
Clyde Street gives us examples of intellectual exchange travelling in both directions.
But we should not make the next move automatically.
Reciprocity does not prove that the relationships are the same.
Nor does it make the people symmetrical.
A senior colleague can learn from somebody without ceasing to be senior.
A facilitator can be changed by a conversation without surrendering their responsibility in it.
One person may have more experience of the terrain while the other notices the thing that changes the route.
Perhaps that is the more useful distinction:
reciprocity without symmetry.
The direction of contribution can change even when responsibility, history, expertise and consequence remain uneven.
That seems to have been present in Keith's relational practice well before we returned to the Critical Friend folder.
And that creates a problem for where this journey goes next.
Over the last year, another practice has evolved around many of the same concerns:
ownership of the question;
challenge without takeover;
changing positions;
continuity across repeated encounters;
one contribution altering the conditions for the next;
and a human retaining responsibility for consequential judgement.
That practice is Human:AI.
The resemblance is now difficult to ignore.
Which means this is exactly the moment not to trust the resemblance.
We have just spent several articles refusing to turn similarity into history.
The same discipline has to apply here.
Before placing the Human:AI practice beside critical friendship or companionship, we need to know what was actually there before this folder was rediscovered.
Not what we can now rewrite it to have been.
Not what looks obvious after meeting Titchen.
What had already been built, named, corrected and recorded.
So the next question is chronological before it is conceptual:
Was this relational shape already present in the Human:AI practice before we knew to look for it here?
Sources followed
Lyons, K. (2016) 'Kevin', Clyde Street, 29 June. Original post.
Lyons, K. (2014) 'Darrell and Adam: Connected Educators', Clyde Street, 1 June. Original post.
Lyons, K. (2015) '#UCSIA15 Connections', Clyde Street, 15 March. Original post.
Lyons, K. (2015) 'Richard, Mark, Darrell, Sheila, and Arvo', Clyde Street, 13 October. Original post.
Beyond the Breadcrumbs, A Conversation That Kept Moving.
Beyond the Breadcrumbs, Travel Companion.
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.