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This article presents research and narratives on the integration of course-based peer learning assistants into seven courses. A new curricular peer mentoring program was piloted in the 2005-2006 academic year in an interdisciplinary liberal arts college at a large Canadian research university. Undergraduate students enrolled in a practicum course which supported their learning while they collaborated with the "host instructor" of the course in which they served as peer mentor. Assistants' roles varied and included individual tutoring, help via email, online discussion facilitation, small group facilitation, in-class presentation and discussion facilitation, and extracurricular study groups. Their integration into scheduled class activities resulted in participating students' perception of enhanced learning. Data included peer mentors' assignments, host instructor feedback, and student surveys.

UK Universities are increasingly being 'encouraged' to focus on student engagement, retention and performance, with learning analytics becoming commonplace. Based on inter-related student-staff partnerships, this study adopted a human and compassionate approach to the use of student data and subsequent interventions. Analysis of focus group and interview data from 86 student participants explored key themes: peer-mentoring increasing engagement with the communal-habitus; increased confidence and engagement; and the demystification and humanisation of the university environment.Findings highlight the importance of emphasising human and compassionate support for students within rapidly developing learning analytics approaches, with subject-specific peer-mentoring found here to be beneficial.

The Lady's Rhetorick is a well-developed rhetorical handbook for women that appears in print at a surprising time and place in British rhetorical history, when there were few precedents for rhetorical treatises addressed to women. This rare and relatively unknown handbook includes a feminist argument for the inclusion of women within the realm of rhetoric, through addressing its instruction to women, defining rhetoric in gender-inclusive ways, and including examples of women's rhetorical practice. It adapts Classical and French rhetorical traditions through strategies that are potentially effective with its female, English audience. Thus its publication was a bold and strategic contribution to women's and men's rhetorical culture within the context of contemporary gender ideology and educational change. The handbook's uniqueness and rarity should be viewed by scholars as the tip of an iceberg, signaling that a significant amount of women's informal rhetorical practice and education could have been acknowledged in its own time as “rhetorical.”