Designing for Real Student Lives is Third Space Work

What happens when curriculum is designed for continuity, but students’ lives are not?

Across Higher Education, there is growing emphasis on lifelong learning, modular provision, flexible pathways and routes into and through study. These developments are often discussed in terms of funding, regulation, systems, credit and institutional readiness.

‍Those things matter. But they are not enough.

‍If lifelong learning is to become meaningful in practice, we need to ask a more difficult question:

‍Are our curricula, assessment practices and student support models designed for the students we actually have, and for the lifelong scholars we say we want to welcome?

That question cannot be answered by academic teams alone. Nor can it be answered solely through professional services, quality processes, student support, data analysis or policy implementation.

‍It is third space work.

The assumptions built into curriculum

Many curriculum and assessment designs still assume that students are present, available and able to engage in consistent ways across a semester, term or programme.

‍That assumption is increasingly difficult to sustain.

‍Who are the people we are designing for? The terminology itself reveals assumptions. In a recent Advance HE Talking Transformation podcast, I discussed with Fiona Lennoxsmith and Dr Helen Murphy why I have come to prefer lifelong scholars over 'students' or 'learners'. The word matters: it signals identity, purpose and inclusion, and it asks institutions to design for people whose lives do not map neatly onto traditional student journeys. Lifelong scholars are balancing paid work, caring responsibilities, commuting, financial pressure and complex lives. Their engagement may be interrupted or episodic. They may step away and return. They may not always feel confident participating in the ways that we expect.

‍We often respond by adding flexibility or support around existing structures. But this risks missing the point. The issue is not only flexibility. It is design.

‍If we take lifelong learning seriously, the question is not simply how we accommodate different patterns of engagement. It is whether our curricula, assessment and student experience are designed in ways that remain coherent when engagement is not continuous.

‍Many current approaches depend on continuity:

§  sequential learning that is difficult to re-enter

§  tightly clustered deadlines that assume stable availability

§  participation expectations that depend upon confidence and presence

§  assessment that rewards consistency, rather than capability

§  support structures that assume students know when, where and how to ask for help.

These designs can work well under ideal conditions. But they are often fragile.

‍They depend upon lifelong scholars being able to engage in particular ways, at particular times and with particular levels of confidence and stability. When those conditions are not met, participation becomes more difficult than it needs to be.

Why this is third space work

Curriculum design for real students’ lives sits across boundaries.

‍It involves academic judgement, assessment design, student engagement, student support, data, timetabling, quality assurance, digital infrastructure, advising, careers, inclusive practice and institutional strategy.

‍No single group owns the problem, and no single group can solve it.

‍This is why third space professionals are so important to the future of lifelong learning. They often occupy the connecting spaces where institutional intent becomes educational practice. They understand the policy environment, but also the operational friction. They work with academic colleagues, and with students, systems, services and data. They see where structures align, and where they do not. They span boundaries rather than create silos.

‍The challenge of designing for lifelong learning is therefore not simply about creating new modules or more flexible entry points. It is about building the connective framework that allows students to enter, belong, pause, return and progress.

‍From flexibility to coherence

A useful distinction here is between flexibility and coherence.

Flexibility is important. But flexibility on its own can become fragmentation.

§  A scholar may be able to access a module, but can they understand how it connects to a wider pathway?

§  They may be able to pause, but is re-entry designed?

§  They may be able to accumulate credit, but is progression understandable?

§  They may be able to study alongside work, but does assessment recognise and make use of the contexts in which learning is applied?

§  They may be welcomed into a programme, but do they feel that their prior experience, identity and aspirations are recognised?

These are not only pedagogic questions. They are institutional design questions.

‍They require the expertise of colleagues working across academic and professional domains, and third space professionals are particularly well-placed with their boundary-spanning positionality. But coherence alone is not enough. A design can look coherent on paper and still fracture when a scholar's engagement is interrupted, when circumstances shift, or when they need to step away and return. The deeper question is not only whether the design makes sense, but whether it remains usable when conditions are imperfect. In other words, is it robust?

Robust, not just flexible

A useful way of thinking about this is in terms of robustness. Some curriculum designs work well only when everything goes to plan. These are fragile.

Others continue to support participation and progression even when engagement is uneven or disrupted. These are more robust.

The aim is not to remove challenge. Nor is it to reduce academic standards.

It is to ensure that curricula, assessment and support remain coherent under the conditions in which students are actually studying.

That requires design. Design that is relational, collaborative and integrated. This is not an abstract standard. Across the sector, colleagues have been developing approaches that are robust in precisely this sense. Their work shows what it looks like when curriculum design takes real student lives as its starting point.

Learning from colleagues across the sector

My toolkit, Designing Curriculum for Real Student Lives: A Toolkit for Higher Education Leaders, draws on several strands of work that many third space professionals will recognise. These approaches illustrate what robust coherence looks like in practice.

Michelle Morgan’s work on transitions and the pre-arrival questionnaire reminds us that institutions should seek to understand students before difficulty becomes visible. This is especially important for lifelong scholars, whose lives, prior experiences and responsibilities may not map neatly onto institutional assumptions about student engagement.

The work of Sally Brown, Kay Sambell and colleagues on authentic assessment and assessment for learning is equally important. If students are combining study with professional, community or caring roles, then assessment should not only test what has been covered. It should help students apply, adapt, explain, question and continue learning beyond the immediate module or programme.

Their work is helpful because it avoids treating assessment as a purely technical process. Assessment shapes how students understand what matters. It communicates what kinds of knowledge are valued. It can either recognise students’ contexts and capabilities, or render them invisible.

Co-creation also matters. In my chapter in The Impact of the Integrated Practitioner in Higher Education (McIntosh and Nutt, Routledge), I explored how genuine co-creation in curriculum design requires structured collaboration across boundaries. Student partnership has long encouraged us to rethink the relationship between students, staff and knowledge. In the context of lifelong learning, co-creation helps surface assumptions about availability, confidence, belonging, prior experience and the hidden demands of study. It reminds us that students should not only be consulted after design decisions have been made. They should help shape the questions we ask. For third space professionals, this is particularly important because co-creation is not only a principle, but a way of organising work across boundaries.

Recognising these principles is one thing. Building them into institutional practice, across boundaries, requires a method. That is where the charrette comes in.

The charrette as a third space method

One of the approaches I have been testing through my Visiting Fellowship at Oxford Lifelong Learning is the use of curriculum design charrettes.

A charrette is a structured, time-bound and collaborative design process. It brings together people who see different parts of the problem and asks them to work with evidence to produce a practical response.

In the context of lifelong learning, this means bringing together academic colleagues, professional services, students, institutional leaders and, where appropriate, employers or community partners.

The value of the charrette is not only that it produces ideas quickly.

It creates a space in which everyone can move beyond their usual roles and responsibilities. They can work together on a shared educational problem. They can examine data, student experience, curriculum structures, assessment patterns and institutional constraints in the same conversation.

This matters because many barriers to lifelong learning are not located in one place. They sit between places.

§  Between curriculum and timetabling.

§  Between credit and progression.

§  Between assessment and lived experience.

§  Between student support and academic identity.

§  Between policy ambition and institutional practice.

Charrettes provide one way of making those boundaries visible and working across them.

We tested this recently with members of the Spinnaker Group, working across roles and institutions to consider, as I posted on this blog, how curriculum might be designed for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement.

Introducing the toolkit

The toolkit is based on a simple, but often overlooked, starting point:

We need to design not for the students we imagine, but for the students who are actually there.

It is designed to help leaders and curriculum teams move from insight to action. It brings together:

§  prompts to surface hidden assumptions about students embedded in curriculum design

§  ways of using evidence to understand how programmes are experienced

§  complementary design principles, including: Being, Belonging, Becoming; Universal Design for Learning; co-creation; and authentic assessment for learning

§  a structured, collaborative method for redesign using charrettes

§  a practical template to develop and test one focused, implementable intervention.

The emphasis is not on large-scale redesign for its own sake.

It is on identifying high-impact, achievable changes that improve coherence, participation and progression under realistic conditions.

A call to third space professionals

Third space professionals have a crucial role in this work.

They can help institutions ask better questions:

§  Where does our curriculum assume continuous availability?

§  Where do lifelong scholars need to re-enter after absence or interruption?

§  Where does assessment create avoidable risk?

§  Where are expectations implicit rather than explicit?

§  Where does modularity risk becoming fragmentation?

§  Where does responsibility fall between teams, rather than being owned collectively?

They can also help create the conditions for better answers.

That means building spaces where evidence, expertise and lived experience can be brought together. It means working across boundaries without assuming that collaboration happens naturally. It means recognising that curriculum design is not only an academic process, but an institutional one.

Lifelong learning will not be realised simply by adding new routes into existing systems.

It requires us to reconsider how those systems are designed.

For third space professionals, this is familiar territory. It is the work of integration, translation, connection and shared practice.

If lifelong scholars are to engage across the life-course, often flexibly and intermittently, then curriculum and assessment need to be robust to those realities.

Not as an exception. As a starting point.

The toolkit is freely available here: www.harrietdm.com/toolkit

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