Peer learning: An effective strategy for promoting students’ learning in a mixed classroom?

University students’ mobility has resulted in an increased diversity in the classroom, offering substantial benefits but also preparing specific challenges. Both local and international students get an opportunity to share their knowledge, ideas and experience and explore new perspectives that could have so far remained hidden to them. Nevertheless, mixing local and international students also brings difficulties in terms of different level of student knowledge, diverse cultural backgrounds and previous learning experience. This paper explores peer learning - a two-way, reciprocal educational strategy that uses a broad range of activities, in which students assist each other with their learning (Boud et al. 2002) - as an instrument potentially useful to overcome these difficulties. Triangulating data from a course on German foreign policy offered at Masaryk University, Czech Republic (students’ mid-term and final reflective questionnaires, teacher’s diary and a peer observation), the paper assesses the ways peer learning affected the interaction between international and local students and the degree to which it proved to be an effective learning instrument in a mixed classroom.