Negotiating the Boundaries as Third Space Educators: Faculty and Mentors Coconstruct Curriculum and Instruction for an Urban Teacher Residency

• In Event: Using Third Space in Teacher Education Design

Abstract

Through co/autoethnography (Author & xxx, 2006), we examine individual and programmatic complexities arising when a third space is opened through an urban teacher residency program (UTR) and we re-invent ourselves as co-teacher educators working with mentor teachers. We ask: How does a third space teacher education program impact the identities and practices of UTR faculty and mentor teachers? How do the institutional regularities of teacher education impose upon the enactment of a third space?

Our UTR is a hybrid model attempting to open a “third space” in teacher education (Zeichner, 2010) where there is a “nonhierarchical interplay between academic, practitioner, and community expertise” (p. 89). Zeichner borrows the term “third space” from critical literacy research and cultural studies (Bhabha, 1994; Gutierrez, 2008) to refer to this hybrid space, an and/also rather than an either/or place. Our UTR reorients learning toward an “and/both” experience, with mentors and faculty playing equally valuable roles (Author, Author, xxxx, xxxx, xxxx, 2013), yet we had few roadmaps guiding us in constructing this new dynamic.

A co/autoethnographic self-study became the methodology best suited to explore individual and programmatic dimensions of our interactions with mentors. Data sources included weekly narrative reflections from faculty and mentors, field-notes from mentor meetings, transcripts from mentor interviews, and residency summative reports. Our data analysis was collaborative, reflective, participatory and recursive; we analyzed the data inductively using the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and looking for emerging patterns and categories across data (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998).

Our data revealed the following tension continua:

Professional into authentic relationships: Initially, mentors developed “professional” relationships with residents that resembled the natural hierarchy between teacher and learner. Faculty intentionally disrupted these traditional boundaries gradually by asking stakeholders to share responsibility of teacher education.
Authority into collaboration: The shifting between “owning” authority (exerting) as expertise and “sharing” or co-constructing knowledge became a contextual process we needed to learn in exploring participation in a third space.
Collaborative agency into individual agency: Most mentors and faculty had worked as individual change agents, but together we realized this was not enough to make sustainable change. The UTR provide opportunities for collaborative agency that emerged from our school experiences.
Individual apprenticing into collective apprenticing: Traditional programs emphasize teacher education as an individual process occurring in isolation. For us, mentoring a resident was something we do in community, especially as we broke down hierarchies and negotiated complex issues of power and authority.

Finally we present the implications of this work within the institutional regularities of universities and schools. We believe third space work is utopian, a change project in which traditional structures and regularities are applied differently. Just because we sit at the table together does not mean we are building an authentic collaborative space where power is distributed across constituencies. A third space epistemology confronts long-standing, practical challenges and demands acute vigilance, continual reflection, flexibility, tolerance for ambiguity, creative imagination and invention, and the regular abandonment of already-formed plans, meanings, roles, and responsibilities.

Authors

• Monica Taylor, Montclair State University

• Emily J. Klein, Montclair State University