Six Months On – Reflecting on The Impact of the Integrated Practitioner in Higher Education (2022)

What COVID19 has laid bare, if the interminable forces of relentless change prior to 2020 had not already done so, is that the organising principles of the modern university and the identities, roles and contributions of those who work within it, must be reimagined

(Kift, 2022)

In the six months since the publication of the Impact of the Integrated Practitioner: Studies in Third Space Professionalism (McIntosh & Nutt, 2022), there is a lot still happening in higher education globally. Change appears to be the only constant and the effects of the pandemic are still being felt. As an Australian STARS Fellow (STARS – Student Transition, Achievement, Retention and Success), I reviewed the monograph early this year prior to its release. The review was accepted for publication in the journal of Student Success in July 2022, alongside a feature article authored by Emily and Diane based on their keynote at the 2022 STARS Conference that I was delighted to introduce.

In the review, I reflect on the four sections of the collection and deliberate the rationale for advocating for blended/integrated practitioners. One of the resounding take-aways from the book’s marvellous compendium is that, in the context of the post-pandemic university, institutions and ways of working must become more flexible, permeable and agile, mirroring the (external) world of current and future work.  As I mention in the review itself, the powerful narratives curated by Emily and Diane from across the globe reveal that the organising principles of the academy must now be reimagined for the next normal, with whole-of-institution emphasis on high-quality collaborative and productive, silo-breaching, relationships. 

Six months on, I still argue that this re-imagination is most critically realised in our (re)established ways of working; our day-to-day impact on diverse student cohorts and their individualised notions of success, and what the evidence says about how well served students are by the educational conditions in which we place them. In their Student Success feature article, Emily and Diane focus specifically on how integrated practice can enhance student success. They explore what third space working and integrated practice means, and how it furthers understanding of our collective and individual identity in, and leadership for, student success in the fluid context of a pandemic-disrupted academy. They consider the ever-changing nature of this important work, especially given the events of the last two years, and discuss how our sector must enable evolving leadership to effectively situate post-pandemic success practice within emerging international conceptions, strategies, structures and systems. 

Staying true to their critically reflective stance, Emily and Diane also ask further important questions about integrated practice, raised first in the monograph and equally as pertinent now. How is our understanding of student success evolving? What are student success professionals doing now, and what are the hallmarks of their and our leadership? How might our identity in this work be understood? What are the core skill sets and experience required for the future, and how might we lead in uncertain times? Helpfully, Emily and Diane extend a model that Whitchurch first articulated in 2009, exploring integrated practice through the four lenses of (1) knowledges, (2) legitimacies, (3) spaces and (4) relationships. 

There is considerable alignment between Emily and Diane’s feature article and my earlier review of their book. In the review, I argue that, during COVID-19, many colleagues drew on the strengths of their third space practice to navigate the unprecedented changes and disruptions higher education was facing.  It is this practice, seen through the four lenses of knowledges, legitimacies, spaces and relationships, that helped us to deliver the “bundles of activity” I write about in the review, where efforts coalesced to respond to the pandemic pivot at pace. But it is more than that. Leveraging the dynamics of these four dimensions of integrated practice in the third space speaks also to the flexibility-in-action and uniquely human skills that are increasingly demanded of workers by Industry 4.0 and changing labour markets. We saw that the sector’s response to pandemic-induced transformation was best managed when essential future workforce attributes were embraced, for example, those of: multidisciplinary practice; hybrid skill sets; creative problem solving; compassionate collaboration; networking, empathetic facilitation and teambuilding; resilience; and resilient communications.

This last observation also surfaces the impact of emotional influences on the daily practice of higher education. Over the pandemic, this morphed into an urgent need to explicitly support the personal and human side of managing relentless institutional change and acknowledge compassionately the ties that bind the personal and the professional. Again, the most effective responses embraced opportunities to create organisational resilience and generate new understandings, values and attitudes. This is also powerfully reflected in the book. Not only are the examples narrated in the collection vivid and applied, they also describe the affect of this work – the power of systems thinking to counter the paradox of systemic and structural pressure points. I still ask, if the academy were not so dualistic, might not our institutional health and wellbeing be enhanced and supported through connection, care and collaboration? In education, one of the most human of enterprises, relationships matter.  

The possibilities replete in the third space are exciting and may just be our salvation in these testing, anxious, resource poor times. And the lessons of the third space can be extended even further, especially in the face of enormous global challenges where investment in education and social cohesion must help chart a way forward. The rich cross-institutional connections and collaborations modelled in the third space can enhance our iterative examination of the purpose of the modern university in wider society and advance the common good of public education and civic engagement to the benefit of national and international prosperity and fairness.

The full book review, published in July 2022 in the journal Student Success can be accessed here: https://studentsuccessjournal.org/article/view/2431/1253.  Emily and Diane’s feature article can also be accessed here: https://studentsuccessjournal.org/article/view/2430/1244.