Joint inquiry in the “third space”

Stein, Coburn, and their colleagues (Stein and Coburn, 2005; Coburn et al., 2005) draw on Wenger’s communities of practice theory to consider how the relationship between research and practice can be better linked so that innovative approaches to educational improvement are more routinely “taken up” in a large number of sites. They suggest that the two worlds of research and practice constitute examples of communities of practice and that the development of new understandings and practices in each of those communities constitutes new learning from which they make decisions about practice. In the past, the relationships between researcher, ISTE, and school communities of practice have tended to be loose and short-term.

Figure 7 (adapted from the work of Stein and Coburn, 2005) considers how the relationship between ISTEs’ and teachers’ communities of practice can be better linked. It suggests that improvement requires the provision of opportunities for members of different communities of practice to learn from each other in the “third space”. The “third space” is the boundary between communities of practice where their members may be exposed to new ideas and practices that affect the meaning members create as they negotiate new learning within their own communities. This process happens through three mechanisms:

• boundary practices: regular ongoing interactions across boundaries and within joint activities;
• brokers: individuals who hold membership in multiple communities and can carry practice between them;
• boundary objects: artefacts, terms, concepts, or documents that travel across the boundaries of one community into another.

Figure 7: Joint inquiry in the third space

Figure 7 text version

Stein, Coburn, and their colleagues describe examples of four projects that successfully reconfigured the relationship between educational research communities and school communities in the ways suggested in Figure 7. These projects resulted in improved educational practices and greater student learning. In each, the projects had to forge new ways of working as they sought how to foster learning within and between each community.

Third space communities constitute unique places for learning. Situated between two established communities, they have the potential to create innovative practices and develop profound new understandings. … The key for third-space R&D [research and development] communities is to sustain productive connections between researchers and practitioners while at the same time developing new and innovative ways of understanding and improving educational practice.

Stein and Coburn, 2005, page 20

Figure 7 recognises the knowledge and theories that both teachers and ISTEs bring to their communities and to professional learning and development. Together, teachers and ISTEs apply and test their knowledge and theories when they use them to investigate authentic problems of practice in the third space. The consequence of this inquiry is new learning for members of both communities of practice, learning that drives the decisions each makes about future action. The long-term consequence should be improved knowledge and practice in each community of practice, resulting in better outcomes for students. Should the results of the inquiry be published, it may also result in an increase in the professional knowledge available to communities of practice beyond the immediate context, contributing to the development of a shared professional knowledge base that is available to all educators. It is a process, too, through which educators can work towards the development of a common theory of improvement.

Sometimes ISTEs work one on one with individual teachers. However, the model reminds us that each person’s work is embedded in and fundamentally affected by the community of practice in which they work.

Stein and Coburn (2005) identify several lessons about the conditions required to foster learning in the third space:

• It is essential to choose boundary practices that create pathways for ideas, approaches, and artefacts to flow into the development process and for new learning to flow back to the home communities.
• It is important to address issues about status and authority in order to develop productive working relationships across institutions.
• The boundary objects need to be targeted enough to keep the work focused, yet flexible enough to allow for the negotiation of meaning between individuals from different communities.
• If the goal is for practitioners in similiar communities of practice to move towards roughly similar forms of practice, they also need opportunities to negotiate meaning with those who develop boundary objects. For example, it is not enough for developers to send boundary objects, such as new curriculum documents, out to multiple school communities and expect that they will all understand and use them in the same way.

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