Travel Companion — Beyond the Breadcrumbs

In April 2017, Keith Lyons had been travelling around England for a month.

Motorways, main roads, side roads and country lanes. Twenty-four coaches. A rental car. Long stretches in which the physical journey gave him time to think about other kinds of journeys.

The post he wrote was called Travel Companion 1.

Keith said that if he placed so much emphasis on coaches' personal learning, he could move on from two descriptions he had been using: “coach developer” and “mentor”. He had been looking for another way to describe his work.

He settled on “travel companion.”

It was Keith's description of his own work. The surviving sources do not tell us that the coaches called him a Travel Companion.

And then, almost as soon as he named it, he left it open.

“I will explain more in subsequent posts,” he wrote. For the moment, this was the start of a conversation about entangled learning involving “leading, following, guiding, meddling … and just being on the bus.”

The explanation he promised is harder to find.

There are later posts about coaches, learning journeys, critical friendship, observation, conversation and support. But in the surviving Clyde Street material I have not found a neat Travel Companion 2 in which Keith returns and tells us exactly what the phrase means.

Perhaps that makes Travel Companion 1 more interesting rather than less.

If Keith did not leave us a definition, he did leave us the journey.

The first clue is in the possessive

Travel Companion was not the beginning of Keith's interest in learning journeys.

Two years earlier, in July 2015, he described a project involving twenty-one high-performance coaches. The meeting he was writing about reviewed two years of work already completed.

His description was precise:

“The project is focussed on coaches' personal learning journeys.”

That matters.

By the time Keith reached Travel Companion 1, the journey was not a metaphor he had suddenly invented while driving around England. Personal learning journeys had already been part of the language of the project.

And Keith's reason for changing his own description was directly connected to them.

If he placed so much emphasis on coaches' personal learning, he wrote, he could move on from coach developer and mentor.

The first clue, then, may be contained in Keith's grammar.

They were coaches' personal learning journeys.

Travel Companion was his attempt to describe his own place in relation to them.

That does not prove that Keith believed a companion should never influence a journey. His own list immediately rules out such a simple interpretation: leading, guiding and meddling are hardly passive activities.

But it does make it difficult to imagine the Travel Companion as the owner of the journey.

Before Keith ever used the phrase, two chairs beside a rugby pitch had prompted a closely related thought. Remembering Lawrence Stenhouse, he wrote about people sharing the same view and came away with an even stronger feeling that those who shared a coach's learning journey should be “beside them and with them.”

Beside.

With.

Not absent. But not obviously in possession either.

No fixed seat

Keith's little sequence in Travel Companion 1 deserves more attention than it first appears to invite.

Leading.

Following.

Guiding.

Meddling.

And just being on the bus.

Those are not the same activity.

They do not even put the companion in the same place.

Sometimes a person leads. Sometimes follows. A guide may know something useful about the terrain. A meddler intervenes. Someone simply “being on the bus” may, at that moment, do very little at all.

Keith did not turn these into competencies or stages. He did not tell us when to move from one to another. There is no Travel Companion method laid out in Clyde Street.

Perhaps that is significant.

His words allow for a relationship in which the position changes.

The companion is not permanently in front.

Nor permanently behind.

Nor even permanently active.

Keith had already been thinking explicitly about leadership and following in his work with coaches. Two months after Travel Companion 1, while packing again for England, he was still writing about a journey with cricket and rugby coaches in which leadership could be entangled with following.

So “just being on the bus” should probably not be dismissed as the joke at the end of the list.

It may be one of the clues.

A companion who keeps coming back

Keith was not continuously travelling beside these coaches.

He kept returning.

In June 2017, two months after Travel Companion 1, he was packing his suitcase for England again.

He said he had been in contact with the group since 2013.

This would be his tenth visit.

They met twice a year, in season and out of season. He went to watch them coach and to talk about their lives in coaching.

There is something important here that the word companion on its own does not tell us.

Keith went away.

The coaches continued coaching.

Their jobs, teams, families, decisions and learning did not stop because he had returned to Australia.

Then he came back.

In July 2017 he described two weeks immersed in conversations, with another two weeks of one-to-one meetings still to come. It was, he said, his fifth year of conversations with that group. Each time they met, a theme seemed to emerge that resonated with the coaches and with him. On that visit they were talking about learning journeys, career options, current practice and the coach a person might become.

Keith does not say that this pattern defines Travel Companionship.

But the pattern gives the word some substance.

Perhaps companionship here was not continuous presence.

Perhaps it included return.

Leaving someone to continue their journey, then meeting them again further along it.

Different voices

There is another reason not to make the travelling too tidy.

Earlier that April, Keith had been thinking about the coaches while listening to Thomas Tallis.

He described the privilege of hearing many voices: two sports, many learning journeys, voices that could be heard changing during four years of conversation. His musical image included voices singing and becoming silent, sometimes alone and sometimes together.

Keith could be romantic about those voices.

The coaches apparently told him so.

Less than two weeks later he wrote that most of the coaches in the group “would get stuck into me about being overly romantic in my view of their coaching.”

That small admission may tell us as much about Travel Companion as some of the more deliberate metaphors do.

A companion can have a view of the journey.

The other traveller can challenge the companion's reading of the journey.

Keith was not describing people who simply received his interpretation of their lives. Their voices remained their own — sufficiently their own to challenge the way he was seeing them.

That makes with a more demanding word.

Keith was travelling too

There is one other relationship worth keeping in sight, although only briefly.

When Kevin Bowring retired in 2016, Keith wrote about a friendship of almost forty years.

He remembered learning from Kevin as a young rugby player, working with him in later decades and then, in 2013, working closely with him again. Kevin had agreed to support a coach-learning project that Keith had suggested — a project Keith described as “following coaches' learning journeys as a critical friend.”

Keith ended the post by saying that he hoped he could continue his own learning journey with Kevin too.

Keith does not call Kevin his Travel Companion.

We should not do it for him.

But the juxtaposition is worth noticing.

While Keith was trying to find a way to describe how he travelled with coaches' learning, he was still describing himself as someone whose own learning journey continued in relationship with another person.

Travel was not only something other people did while Keith accompanied them.

Keith was a learner too.

Being there did not guarantee being let in

If Travel Companion meant being alongside another person, the later posts place an important limit on what “alongside” could mean.

Years of relationship did not guarantee disclosure.

In September 2017, writing about his critical friendships with coaches, Keith acknowledged that there had been many occasions when coaches had not communicated what they were experiencing.

He hoped his coach friends felt able to lean on him.

But, he wrote, “despite my offers they sometimes choose not to lean.”

The larger questions of listening, challenge and care belong elsewhere in the Clyde Street story.

For Travel Companion, the narrower point may be enough.

Being available did not oblige somebody else to use that availability.

Being a companion did not create a claim on the other person's experience.

A few months later Keith made that boundary almost physical.

He met two coaches. One had been involved in his critical-friend project for five years.

Keith asked one question.

What they told him stayed in confidence.

He then watched the team and wrote not as somebody who had arrived at the centre of their world, but as someone conscious of the privilege of access to “the outskirts of their everyday practice … grazing.”

Five years in.

Still on the outskirts.

That seems difficult to separate from the meaning of companionship.

So what was a Travel Companion?

A role?

Probably not a stable professional one. Keith was describing his own work, not announcing a new occupational category. He supplied no job description.

A method?

There were certainly practices around the relationship: travelling, returning, watching, talking, sometimes leading or guiding, sometimes following or meddling.

But Keith did not codify them as a Travel Companion method.

A metaphor?

Certainly.

The phrase emerged while he was literally travelling through England, thinking about physical journeys and personal learning journeys.

But by then those journeys had years of practice behind them. The metaphor had something real to attach itself to.

An ethic?

Perhaps.

The surviving posts repeatedly leave the coach's learning personal, the coach's voice distinct, and disclosure voluntary. Even long relationships did not give Keith automatic access.

A stance?

Perhaps that comes closer.

Beside and with.

Able to lead and to follow.

Able to intervene and, at other times, simply remain on the bus.

Or was Travel Companion really a relationship?

Something that could not be established by Keith naming himself at all, but only acquire meaning through the repeated meetings, conversations, disagreements, absences and returns that followed?

Clyde Street does not settle the choice.

It may be better that it doesn't.

Keith called his post Travel Companion 1.

He said he would explain more.

What survives is not the promised neat explanation. It is a much less orderly collection of journeys: coaches speaking and sometimes becoming silent; Keith travelling away and coming back; conversations developing over years; people challenging his view of them; invitations to lean that could be declined; confidential things that remained confidential; privileged access that still left him on the outskirts.

And, somewhere inside all of it, the possibility of leading, following, guiding, meddling —

or just being on the bus.

What remains instead is the journey itself.