Technicians in the Third Space: from the periphery to the centre
When Celia Whitchurch first conceptualised the “Third Space”, the technician workforce was largely absent from the discourse. Partly, this can be attributed to their well-documented invisibility in HE policy and strategy, but the omission is also understandable given Whitchurch’s emphasis on the emergence of blended professional services teams. Specifically, her exploration focused on the evolving identities of staff located between academic and professional domains whose work crossed institutional boundaries, challenging and unsettling the traditional academic/non-academic binary.
In the early to mid-2000s, the dividing ‘line’ between academics and technicians was clear and unchallenged, and the idea that technicians could undertake an academic activity such as teaching seemed far-fetched. Hence, technicians were rarely discussed as third space practitioners. However, fast-forward to the present, and in many practice-based disciplines the previously distinct lines between technical and academic teachers have become increasingly porous, propelling technicians from the periphery of the third space to its frontiers.
In my research, I describe this transformation as a ‘technical turn’ that I theorise has evolved, in part, in response to the political and economic pressures that have increased expectations around skills, employability, value for money, and graduate outcomes. Social expectations have also changed: students expect high-quality learning environments and experiences, while technological advances have made specialist technical expertise more central to creative and applied disciplines. At the same time, traditional academic roles have become increasingly fragmented, with many drawn into theory rather than practice, in what Susan Orr calls an ‘academic turn’ coinciding with Ronald Barnett’s notion of a ‘competency turn’, in which the emphasis of what is taught and learned has shifted from ‘knowledge’ to ‘know-how’. Cumulatively, these factors have shaped the conditions in which technical skills have gained status, enabling the technicians who teach them to evolve their roles and identities from supporters of equipment and processes into qualified, capable educators.
As a technician, a manager of technicians, and later a director of a university technical department, I observed this transition firsthand. Early on, as a technician, when I noticed that my pedagogies were comparable to those of my academic peers, I questioned it with management and was advised that I was ‘demonstrating’ whereas my academic colleagues were ‘teaching’. The words felt like slippery semantics, carefully chosen not to describe the activity; rather to reinforce and police the ‘line’ separating the activities and status of technical and academic staff.
As a director of service and university governor, I observed the same terms being used by senior stakeholders, without a clear understanding of how learning and teaching were delivered in their institution and by whom. I tried to make sense of these trends within the literature but found that pedagogic research was almost all exclusively written by academic staff, about academic teaching, for academic audiences.
I began a doctorate in 2019 to examine ‘the line’ that differentiates technical teaching from academic teaching. My research identified three insights. First, there is ‘no line’, second, a paradox exists where many institutions simultaneously rely upon technical teaching to deliver the core curriculum, while sustaining cultures that fail to recognise, reward, or develop it, and third that technicians conceive of their pedagogies as being on a spectrum ranging from the relatively straightforward teacher-centred (content delivery) to student-centred (transformative learning), which, mirrors the same spectrum of conceptions found within virtually all studies of academic conceptions of teaching.
While my research was arts-based, I was invited to join the Research England Policy Commission (TALENT) to explore evolving technical roles in higher education and research at a national level, and across all disciplines. The study provided a sense of scale, finding that, overall, 81% of the estimated 50,000 UK technicians were teaching in HE, with arts disciplines as an outlier at 95%. The report's findings included a “blurring of lines between academic and technical teaching,” and the recommendations called for the sector to recognise and resource the shift.
There are signs that this is happening; analysis by Advance HE found that just under a fifth of providers referenced technicians in their Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) submission in 2017, which increased to over a third in 2023, with descriptions becoming richer; technicians were associated with learning environments, one-to-one support, feedback, curriculum delivery, specialist environments, employability, and pastoral support.
In earlier work, I described the overlap between academic and technical pedagogies in creative higher education as a “Synchronous Space”, extending Whitchurch’s third space model. My proposition is that technical and academic teaching do not simply occupy contiguous territories with some overlap; rather, they coexist in the same learning spaces, around the same students, projects, materials, and outcomes.
My new book, Technical Teaching in Higher Education: Insights from the Creative Arts, expands on my research, setting out how contemporary technicians are challenging and pushing the limits of the third space model. Celia’s generous endorsement of my book affirms that technical staff have, up to now, been largely absent from the expanding literature on blurred boundaries and third space roles. I hope my book helps address that absence and inspires others located at the periphery of the third space to contribute their voices to inform a more inclusive understanding and narrative of who teaches in HE.
