Common ground – no place, or Utopia?

In the long-ago times when staff from different institutions were able to meet face-to-face and share the news from their learning and teaching workplaces, we would wryly count around the table as people reported which centres had been restructured that quarter. A decade ago, there seemed always to be at least one institution, sometimes several, that had suffered some organisational shift, a turnover of Director or a function reassigned. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered further instability, with many Australian universities restructuring workforces and organisational priorities.

The thoughtful reorganisation of a university work unit brings many benefits – a new agenda, fresh team culture, an opportunity to raise awareness and profile – but what it doesn’t encourage is a permeable boundary. Managements need to bed down new structures via defined staff roles. Reporting lines are strengthened to control information flow; units seek recognition from the institution, particularly the valuable attention of faculty, by promoting their services as a discrete entity, potentially at the expense of other organisational groups. Restructuring may mean resetting relationships between professional and academic staff, as Matthew Lawson laments, and between people from different third space areas, so that when we want to combine the expertise we bring to the university, we may need to meet “under the radar” (Whitchurch, 2003), and recreate a common ground from no place.

What can we do if we are restructured out of relationships? What can third space workers learn from other organisational structures and their relationship with others in the university?

It is easy to imagine a Utopia where third-space services are each systematically included within university processes and policies. However, in large institutions where staff must balance priorities across a spectrum from 'essential for accreditation' through to institutional policy and 'nice to haves', this risks a 'tick and flick' approach to consultation with third-space services. Systematic representation in documentation provides limited assurance of authentic inclusion in key spaces. There is an upper limit as to what documented inclusion looks like without persuasive, sustained advocacy from third-space staff. Therefore, when imagining where we would like to be, we must reimagine what we mean when we talk about our desire for 'systematic involvement'.  

How, then, might we define systematic involvement, and where could it take us in relation to where we would we like to be? If systematic involvement does not wholly materialise through inclusion in institutional policies and processes, and if it requires advocacy, then perhaps it is our own systematic drive that leads to meaningful engagement and partnership with our colleagues and inclusion in areas core to our work. But this is not a simple proposition: institutional silos and structures, by nature, add a layer of complexity to advocacy. Third-space staff are frequently dispersed across portfolios, with different frameworks and separate reporting lines. It is here where our individual systematic drive becomes a key driver in our ability to transcend structural boundaries in pursuit of partnering with our colleagues to deliver quality learning experiences to students despite the structures that contain us.

The advantage of not being accommodated in the hierarchy is that we can create the place we need. We can commit to collaboration for the future university or for work which doesn’t exist yet. Where, for example, where does knowledge and practice of digital and information literacy sit, adequate to the challenges and opportunities of a pretty-good-text-generating chat bot? The Academic Integrity Unit? Library and Information Services? Educational Design? – given a great challenge, great champions of collaboration (Veles et al., 2019) are needed!

The higher education sector is experiencing vast and erratic technological, pedagogical, staffing and funding changes and uncertainty. It is within this shaky environment that third-space staff operate. During uncertain times, it is tempting to double-down and hold one's space as a means of protecting those parts of our roles that are familiar and offer safe and known ways of doing, being and contributing. However, in doing so we anchor the now to the past and prevent ourselves from pitching to the future. Through recognising that uncertainty and instability are a part of higher education, we emancipate ourselves from what has come before and position ourselves to be adventurous, proactive and lean into the unknown. It is from here that we can set ourselves aside and focus on centring the student and working together to construct new and innovative services around their needs.

Image by soapbeard on flicker, a detail of the 2008 art project by Rory Macbeth where the whole text of More’s Utopia was painted in white around a former electricity building.

Veles, N., Carter, M.-A., & Boon, H. (2019). Complex collaboration champions: University third space professionals working together across borders. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 23(2–3), 75–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2018.1428694

Whitchurch, C. (2003). Reconstructing identities in Higher Education: The rise of ‘Third Space’ professionals. Routledge.  https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203098301