Abstract:
The Australian Universities Accord Interim Report presents an opportunity to reset the tertiary education landscape and reimagine, if not reinscribe, the purposes of the key roles of academics, teaching and research and the ‘mission’ of the university to society. Its 2023 Interim Report identifies the importance of teaching, placing emphasis on ‘teaching methods’ in the higher education classroom. However, it offers a limited view of the teaching specialist position, if at all, focusing on delivery modes and models. While putatively valuing and respecting all academic roles, the Review reinforces the simplistic and reductive dichotomy of either teaching or research and contributes to the continuing tension between teaching and research within an Initial Teacher Education perspective.
This paper takes a discourse-analytical approach to the role of teaching specialists to explore the discursive and subjectivisation constraints implicated by position descriptors and statements within this dichotomous landscape. Considering the authors’ positions as teaching specialists in Initial Teacher Education, this paper argues for supervisory activities in HDR spaces as constitutive of Bhabha’s third space, as a generative space of possibility that can bridge this teaching-research divide and where teaching specialists can reconceptualise themselves, their practice, and their purpose. Approaching teaching as a fundamental expression of research, this paper argues for a new understanding of the teaching specialist position within Initial Teacher Education., and seeks to encourage doctoral graduates undertaking teaching specialist roles to inhabit this liminal space between teaching and research to maintain relevance and break boundaries in a shifting university landscape.