TELedvisors webinar March 2025 – Working in the Higher Education Third Space

Third space practitioners working in higher education strive to enable and support better learning and teaching using their professional expertise. They can face a number of challenges in building relationships and contributing to the decision-making which directly impacts their work.

This webinar draws on two publications from the recent Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education special issue on the third space.

A narrative account of third space technology enhanced learning and teaching roles working in Australian higher education: Meredith Hinze (UniMelb) and Kashmira Dave (Uni New England) will discuss their paper exploring the nature of several key third space roles and connections between their professional identity, professional relationships and organisational context.

Institutional responsibility and third space professionals: a call for structural change to embrace ambiguity: Evonne Irwin (UniMelb) will then discuss her paper examining the need for more effective communication, inclusion, and opportunity creation for third space practitioners in higher ed.

The session will conclude with discussion of issues arising from these papers and consideration of what we can do about them.

Please register here to access the webinar and/or the webinar recording

Further details:

Part 1

Meredith Hinze is Manager eLearning/eTeaching at the University of Melbourne, based in a Faculty context. Meredith specialises in learning design with technology, innovative pedagogies and the application of technology enhanced learning. She has a background in teaching digital media. Her research focuses on professional identity and the role of the learning designer/learning technologist.

Dr Kashmira Dave is an experienced academic and educational learning design specialist with over 20 years of experience in teaching, learning design, and research. Her work spans diverse fields, including learning and teaching in HE, curriculum development, learning design, third space, active learning, technology integration, inclusion and ePortfolios in higher education. As a Senior Lecturer in Academic Development at the University of New England, Kashmira leads professional development initiatives, supports curriculum innovation, and oversees projects that enhance SoTL for academic staff. Kashmira is a published researcher and reviewer, her passion is advancing educational practices through evidence-based strategies fostering a community of practice in higher education.

We provide a collaborative autoethnographic narrative account (Poulos, 2021) of our experiences as practitioners working in overlapping, related Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) roles (academic developer, learning designer, educational technologist) in Australian universities. Despite wide ranging demand for our roles, particularly during and post COVID pandemic (Bellaby and Sankey, 2020; Baré et al., 2021) these ‘third space’ roles (Whitchurch 2008; 2013) are often not well understood (Mitchell et al., 2017; Altena et al., 2019). Such roles may experience challenges in credibility and visibility (Fyffe, 2018), relationship-building (Mitchell et al., 2017), and limitations for career progression (Slade et al., 2019). We provide a selection of our accounts related specifically to key tensions for third space TEL roles in building collaborative relationships and what these contradictions in practice can mean for productivity, morale, wellbeing, career progression and identity formation.Our autoethnographic process has uncovered connections between professional identity, professional relationships and organisational context that provide insight into tensions for third space productivity and morale. We propose a tentative framework to explain the relationships of these connections, which may support those in third space TEL roles and their managers in making sense of their identities. By discussing our own journeys, not only can we begin to uncover tensions more fully, but we also uncover viable solutions to the way progression pathways, organisational structures and relationships across teams are conceived and leveraged within and across the sector

Part 2

Third space professionals have occupied ambiguous spaces in higher education hierarchies for decades. While this positioning can be fruitful and lead to creative solutions and responses for our institutions in challenging times, third space professionals, by and large, remain structurally marginalised, with limited or unclear access to rewards, recognition and career progression. These limitations can inhibit the volume of third space professionals’ voices in debates which challenge dominant understandings about traditional practices in the academy. Based on the findings from a PhD project on the identities and experiences of third space professionals in Australian higher education, I argue that resisting dominant discourses from the margins is a difficult endeavour requiring both the centre and margin to find a common language to engage in critical dialogue. With ambiguous and limited pathways for progression and recognition, third space professionals risk being unheard. Our institutions, therefore, have a responsibility to create formal (and perhaps temporary) classification-crossing opportunities for third space career progression and reward, leading to an amplification of the voices of third space professionals in critical dialogue about their positioning.