The last article ended with a small question.
Why companion?
It sounds like a question about vocabulary.
It is not.
By the time Angie Titchen published Critical companionship: part 1 in 2003, companion was carrying a particular idea about how one person might help another learn from practice.
The critical companion did not simply arrive, inspect the work and offer a better view.
They accompanied a co-learner on an experiential learning journey.
That distinction begins with movement, but it does not end there.
Titchen describes companion and co-learner as being together for the duration of the journey. The relationship combines high challenge and high support. It requires knowing the practitioner and the situation, judging what matters, attending to timing, and helping the practitioner learn from their own experience. Her 2003 paper presents this as both a metaphor and a conceptual framework.
The interesting word may be with.
Inside the framework is a relationship domain built from four processes:
mutuality
reciprocity
particularity
graceful care
These are not four ways of being agreeable.
Mutuality means working together in a carefully negotiated partnership. Titchen explicitly discusses creating greater equality where hierarchy or specialist expertise might otherwise place one person above the other, and sharing responsibility for the structure, process and outcomes of the relationship.
Reciprocity goes further.
The exchange is not imagined as expertise flowing in one direction. Titchen describes the people involved as giving and receiving, learning and sharing knowledge, interpretations and experience. The person being accompanied is a co-learner, not simply a recipient.
That does not make the relationship symmetrical.
The critical companion is still described as an experienced facilitator. They may know more about facilitation, professional practice or the terrain being examined. Mutuality does not require pretending those differences have vanished.
It changes what is done with them.
Expertise becomes something that can be offered into the relationship rather than something that automatically owns it.
The full 2003 framework makes that especially clear in its discussion of particularity.
A companion needs to know this practitioner.
Not a generic learner.
Not an abstract user of a method.
This person, in this situation, with this experience, at this point in the journey.
That knowledge is bounded by what the practitioner wishes to disclose. It is then combined with the companion's own knowledge and judgement to create learning opportunities appropriate to that person and moment.
Again, with turns out to be demanding.
It requires enough proximity to know something of the person and their practice without taking possession of either.
There is another clue to the choice of word, although its provenance needs keeping visible.
In 2014, Michele Hardiman and Jan Dewing published a critical review of the companionship framework while developing related models of Critical Ally and Critical Friend. Their process included reviewing the literature and dialogue with Titchen herself.
They report that Titchen had originally considered the word friend and rejected it.
Their explanation is concise: because the mutuality in the relationship requires commitment, Titchen considered companion the better description. Hardiman and Dewing, 2014.
That is a later account of Titchen's naming decision, not a line I have verified in her 2000 thesis.
But it makes an important distinction visible.
A companion is not necessarily a friend in the ordinary sense.
Nor is companionship merely friendship weakened into something more professional.
The word points towards commitment to a shared passage.
Two people agree to travel together for some part of the work.
One may bring greater experience.
One may need more help.
Both remain participants.
Both may learn.
And the relationship is shaped around where the co-learner is trying to go.
This also helps explain why critical does not disappear when companion enters.
The framework includes consciousness-raising, problematisation, self-reflection and critique. It asks the companion to notice what has become taken for granted, help make apparently unproblematic situations questionable, and support new knowledge being exposed to scrutiny.
Companionship is not an alternative to challenge.
It is an account of the relationship in which challenge is exercised.
Perhaps that is why the word has more weight than it first appears to.
Friend can describe affection, trust or loyalty.
Mentor can describe a developmental role.
Facilitator can describe a function.
Companion describes being alongside somebody while something unfolds.
At least, that is what this literature asks the word to carry.
And then Titchen adds one detail which stops the metaphor becoming too comfortable.
Companion and co-learner are together only for the duration of their journey.
At the end, they part.
Which leaves another question.
If companionship is a journey undertaken together, what does it mean that the relationship is also designed to end?
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.
Titchen, A. and McGinley, M. (2003) 'Facilitating practitioner research through critical companionship', NT Research, 8(2), pp. 115–131. doi:10.1177/136140960300800205. Publisher record.
Hardiman, M. and Dewing, J. (2014) 'Critical Ally and Critical Friend: stepping stones to facilitating practice development', International Practice Development Journal, 4(1), Article 3. doi:10.19043/ipdj.41.003. Full article.