Abstract
In this article, co-authored by two undergraduate students (one international) and two academics in a media faculty of a post-92 university (e.g., Polytechnic), in England, we share the findings and offer a reflexive lens on the process of a media practice education collaboration in the community, through the co-production of the animated film Hunger by the Sea: https://vimeo.com/234840520 . The contributors to this research are media practice academics, media and journalism students from related but distinct disciplines, and the users and providers of a food bank on the English coast. The food bank users and providers have not been involved in this writing, but their voices are (literally) heard in the project’s primary outcome—the animated film. In this article, we articulate reflections on how the project, in bringing together academics, students, and community participants in a challenging but rich space, enabled exchanges of expertise and new, boundary-crossing ways of being in education that can be discussed as “third space” interactions.
Highlights
In our exploration of the process and outcomes, we describe the distinct nature of the food bank project and hypothesise that Students as Partners (SaP) can take back to their second spaces those rich experiences that disrupt apparently neutral functional and economic discourses about why we are learning in digital media spaces as opposed to what we are learning
Reviewing our outcomes in the framework of the maturing field of SaP, we return to the emerging themes above: interdisciplinary working; inclusive and ethical partnership; powersharing; challenges with uncertain outcomes in the “brave space”; and student-centric reporting
What happens to people doing education—as partners—in a third space?
Summary
This is a partnership between two academics and two students, and the providers and users of a food bank. With regard to university learning and teaching, the first space is home/community/family, the second space is the university, and the third space can be a physical, metaphorical, or digital/virtual space (or a combination of these), which is in between the first and second; whilst this can be a physical space, it is more importantly a space for thinking and working differently For this project, we are not claiming the food bank as a third space, but we are suggesting that the way we worked in partnership was indicative of a third space in which pedagogy is negotiated and in which different forms of knowledge are acknowledged and validated.
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