Abstract
This case study discusses how we harnessed a University Teaching Fellowship to open a collective third space partnership with “non-traditional” students to enable them to draw on their experiences of transition into higher education and to produce resources designed to help other students find their place, voice, and power at university. We discuss first the “in-between” opportunities of learning development as a “third space profession” that enables us to work in creative partnership with students. We further set the scene by exploring the third space potential of learning development per se and then examine the successful development and administration of a learning development module, Becomingan Educationist, at a medium-sized university in the United Kingdom.We conclude by arguing for third space partnerships not just alongside the curriculum, but in and through the curriculum as well.
Highlights
The learning developers (LDers) is not there to tell the student how to do the work “properly,” but to listen, to discuss, and to work with the student to decode the assignment and decide how to tackle it with understanding and power. This dialogic encounter (Bakhtin, 1981) “flattens” the hierarchies of the relationship, creating something much more porous and much more welcoming: a space of opportunities. This co-created space has third space potential— the potential for something to happen that is other than the traditional top-down hierarchical lecturer-student relationship or the add-on learning support provided by other education stakeholders
All the students that we invited to participate in the University Teaching Fellowship (UTF) project had taken our module, Becoming an Educationist, which we had created as far as possible to be a third space opportunity even bounded as it was by curricular constraints
When given the opportunity, we used UTF funding to create a project in which some of these students could expand on their skills and knowledge and work in partnership with us as third space professionals to create resources to help other students
Summary
This case study discusses what happened when we recruited students who had successfully completed Becoming to take part in our University Teaching Fellowship (UTF) funded project to produce empowering resources for other students like themselves. All the students that we invited to participate in the UTF project had taken our module, Becoming an Educationist, which we had created as far as possible to be a third space opportunity even bounded as it was by curricular constraints.
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