Chapter 8: Teacher Educator Collaborative Planning And Opportunities For Learning In A Professional Development School

Whereas academic expertise has typically been privileged over practitioner expertise in teacher education, Zeichner (2010) calls for third spaces to bring together both types of expertise. Zeichner describes third spaces in teacher education as “hybrid spaces in preservice teacher education programs that bring together school and university-based teacher educators and practitioner and academic knowledge in new ways to enhance the learning of prospective teachers” (p. 92). Third spaces have been identified as a transformative environment for learning (Gutierrez, 2008; Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, & Tejeda, 1999).

The notion of third spaces supports a dialectical rather than a dichotomous relationship between practitioner and academic expertise (Zeichner, 2010). Gorodetsky and Barak (2008) described this dialectical relationship in their analysis of an “edge community,” a third space comprised of preservice teachers, inservice teachers, and university faculty members. They write, “It was accepted that each participant has the potential for constructive contribution to the collaborative learning process, whether it stems from experience, theoretical knowledge, common sense or genuine novice questions that probe the obvious” (p. 1911). Third spaces create the potential to value the expertise of each participating member regardless of background; the differences in expertise are meant to complement one another. By their very nature, third spaces demand that participants cope with power differentials and multiple, sometimes conflicting roles in their teacher education work (Gutierrez, 2008; Martin, Snow, & Franklin Torrez, 2011; Williams, 2014; Yendol-Silva & Dana, 2004).