JLDHE Special Issue – Third Space in HE

At the end of January 2025, we were delighted to launch a special issue of the Journal of Learning Development on Higher Education on the third space in HE.

The origins of the special issue take us back to a dull and rainy day in October 2023. As a guest editorial team, we work in services across the Education and Academic Services Division at the University of Exeter. Whilst some of us are in the same team. we all work tangentially together on various strategic projects across the institutions. We are collaborators and colleagues with an interest and investment in promoting the importance of third space expertise in our own careers and our wider institution. As you might imagine, this regularly involves coming together to lament the challenges we face working in the third space. When I joined the University of Exeter in 2015 in my first PS role, Dr. Dawn Lees and I worked on the same corridor. Even though I had left my ‘academic’ research in discipline behind me, I was still keen to theorise, present and publish my teaching practice – but there was no precedent in my team for doing so. Luckily, in one of those chance conversations in a shared kitchen whilst making a cup of tea, Dawn shared her own experience of the lack of time, opportunity and support to publish her practice – and how she had gone ahead and done it anyway. And when you have a role model, you know what’s possible. So, I went ahead and ‘did it anyway’ too.

Fast forward a few years and a few roles, and I begin work as the Head of Educator Development, working closely with Dr. Eleanor Hodgson and Dr. Karen Kenny as the Senior Educator Developers in the team. Karen was also committed to presenting and publishing her work and together, we wanted to create space and a culture of this in our team – for those that wanted to. Like so many of our third space colleagues, we all came from ‘academic’ backgrounds and wanted to bring this part of our professional identity with us into the third space. Of course, time and space to do this was not, and has never been, forthcoming.

Alongside these discussions, we continued to talk with colleagues across our service – including Dawn, Rachel Sloan who works in Dawn’s team and James Anthony-Edwards, our University Librarian, about our frustration to be recognized as educators and experts in our own right. At this point Dawn was our only PS PFHEA, and I was our only PS NTF. I am delighted to now say Dawn is our only triple crown – having been awarded PFHEA, CATE and NTF. And yet despite these accolades, our long lists of presentations and publications – we still didn’t feel we were taken seriously by the wide university community as educators. After a particularly challenging meeting where a colleague asked ‘why are these people in PS were making decisions about education when they aren’t educators’, I decided enough was enough. And our next conversation lamenting the challenges we faced as third space professionals turned into a simple question – instead of just talking about it, why don’t we do something?

And so, we contacted JLDHE, drafted a call for papers (heavily inspired by the authors and contributors to this blog, and discussing our own experience of working in the ‘third space’) and sent it out in to the world. Given the fervor of our local conversations perhaps we should have predicted the level of response we got to the call – but we didn’t and were completely blown away.

What we ended up with was a special issue consisting of 57 articles by 145 authors (not including ourselves!). We split these into 4 themes to find a ‘way through’ for readers, but even this process felt arbitrary at time with the considerable overlap between thoughts, ideas and experiences. Nonetheless, our 4 themes were:

• Collaboration and partnerships, and the ways in which collaboration can create opportunities for third space individuals to gain professional and personal empowerment and agency (Abegglen, Burns and Sinfield, 2023)

• Identity and positioning, incorporating personal reflections and proposals to increase visibility and recognition of those who identify as third space professionals

• Leadership, influence, and credibility, including the role of trust and credibility in collaborative working across ‘spaces’ (Little and Green, 2021) and valuing and increasing the visibility of third space professionals (Hall, 2022)

• Careers and professional development of third space professionals and integrated practitioners (McIntosh and Nutt, 2022)

Following the publication of the journal on 30th January 2025, we held a launch event on 7th February at 1pm on a Friday afternoon – online, and therefore with no free food. Expecting only a handful of attendees, we were greeted with a vibrant virtual room of 128 colleagues from across the sector – and indeed, across the world. What followed was a wide ranging and rich discussion about the journal special issue, but also on being a third space professional in general – emulating the local conversations that had sparked the journal, but this time on a sector wide scale.

At the close of the event, we were certain that these conversations needed to continue. So , Karen and Eleanor and I started by setting up a LinkedIn group – Third Space in HE – to connect, discuss and extend the work started with the special issue and the launch. We hope and plan forall sorts of grand outputs along the way – short podcasts, regular discussion events, talks, panels and even campaigning in and around the sector. But to start, we wanted to lay out our case. So, what follows will be a series of blog posts that outline the background of a ‘call to action’ to the sector that we have developed from the special issue and the discussions at the launch event.

To give you a sneak peak of what’s to come, our overall ‘call to action’, as articulated in our guest editorial, is to create more opportunities for third space professionals in senior leadership roles. To achieve this, we suggest the following – the topics of the upcoming posts:

• Better definition of third space roles

• The opportunities created for and in the third space

• Synchronisation across the sector of third space contract types, promotions routes and recognition

• Clearer career pathways and opportunities for professionalisation and recognition

References

• Abegglen, S., Burns, T. and Sinfield, S. (eds) (2023) Collaboration in higher education: a new ecology of practice. London: Bloomsbury.

• Hall, J. (2022) ‘Understanding and debating the third space’, in E. McIntosh and D. Nutt (eds) The impact of the integrated practitioner in higher education. London: Routledge, pp.26−32.

• Little, D. and Green, D. (2021) ‘Credibility in educational development: trustworthiness, expertise, and identification’, Higher Education Research and Development, 41, pp.804−819. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2020.1871325

• McIntosh, E. and Nutt, D. (eds) (2022) The impact of the integrated practitioner in higher education. London: Routledge.