Purposes, structures, roles - the politics of learning in the third space

Purposes, structures, roles: the politics of learning in the third space.

I’m new to thinking explicitly about ‘third space’ professional working, but I’ve generally worked across boundaries in my HE career, sometimes explicitly, more often not, but always attempting to take an ‘integrated’ approach and drawing on the range of my professional knowledge, experience and identities. My approach was influenced at quite an early stage in my academic career by Wenger-Trayner et al’s (2014) insights on ‘systems convening’, and work in my most recent academic role, leading a Social Work division, was influenced by my expertise and experience as a Career Development professional. This additional dimension of expertise impacted strongly on our team approach to reimagining and reconstructing an ‘outward facing’ Social Work curriculum and student experience, as well as on my approach to line managing and developing academic staff. As a team, we sought to capture, conceptualise and work from the totality of the experiences we were seeking to reconfigure, because we understood instinctively that student and staff experiences are always multidimensional- always ‘third space’.

In this short post, I want to focus on a phenomenon that I’ve been conscious of since I started working in HE. Put simply, it is this: we don’t often enough recognise, or explicitly discuss, how organisational structures and job roles enable outcomes and, therefore, purposes. Encouraging people to mobilise ‘hybrid’ expertise across structural boundaries to develop the kinds of outcomes we say we want is a good thing and its contemporary ubiquity is recognised in the literature on third space professional working (Whitchurch, 2018). However, I think the development of third space working sometimes belies the fact that our structures, and the roles within them, don’t always work as well for us as they might (see McIntosh and Nutt, 2022 for a range of discussions that challenge HE’s organising principles). I think this holds even where we explicitly conceptualise structures in terms of process, where structures represent relationships and activities that are more fluid and less predictable.

Regardless of how we conceptualise structures, we organise our activity in certain ways and our structures, and the roles that exist within them, tell us a lot (though not always what we tell ourselves) about what we think we are, and should be, doing. It is not uncommon in central university departments to find a degree of separation between learning/teaching and curriculum functions and broader student support functions- and this separation defines the professional roles that exist in these areas (some, admittedly, more multidimensional than others). While there’s no doubt that we need to recognise and utilise a range of specific professional expertise and deploy specialist interventions in our institutions, there is too often no clearly expressed, shared understanding of key purposes that clarifies and directs activity in and across central departments and articulates the nature of the relationship of central activity to activity at the ‘chalk-face’, in our faculties or schools - where student and academic staff identities are forged and develop, where programmes are delivered. To work for students and staff, our curricula need to be considered as more than the sum of learning activities and they need to integrate activity that has sometimes been conceived of as happening ‘somewhere else’. This is not a call to design ever more abstract programme-level learning outcomes, but to recognise the situated nature of the student experience, as one of learning for as well as about, that connects learning experiences to our various concerns in the world.

My experience across a number of academic and professional services roles has convinced me that a broader range of expertise is needed at the ‘chalk face’. For example, career learning expertise and expertise in adult learning should routinely be integrated with subject area expertise as we design and deliver the curriculum. Where this happens, it facilitates a focus on the relevance and purpose of what we are doing and it shines a brighter light (for students and staff) on transferability of learning, how we might best design assessment and consider a spectrum of accessibility issues. A key question for me is whether we should have to ‘call in the experts’ from elsewhere when doing this everyday work, rather than having that broader range of expertise embedded within our teams as standard. If we go a little further, we need to ask whether ‘teaching staff’ ought to have a broader range of knowledge and expertise as standard. This takes us into territory where we have to confront our questions about purposes, and the broader politics of learning head-on. What’s all the learning for? That question too often leads us to discussions about and the shape of an ‘inevitable’ future, evident in employability discourses and discussions about future labour markets, in which we risk forgetting precisely what all the learning is for- our ongoing, collective endeavours to bring the future of our choosing into being (Stetsenko, 2017).