Partnering in the third space: What motivates teachers’ and school leaders’ involvement in school-university partnerships?

In the field of teacher education, the perceived divide between theory and practice has been a perennial issue with widespread impacts on pre-service teachers, teacher practice, and educational research. One means of addressing this issue is the establishment of school-university partnerships that capitalise on the expertise of stakeholders across both institutions. These partnerships have been recommended by governments both internationally and within Australia to strengthen the teaching profession across all career stages. When these intentional and deliberate school-university partnerships are collaborative and non-hierarchical in nature they can be described as operating in the ‘third space’ where the domains of school and university intersect. This enables binaries (such as theory vs. practice) to be abandoned and the roles and responsibilities of pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, and teacher educators to be transformed, generating new learning opportunities. In current research, school-university partnerships are viewed positively as opportunities for collaboration and mutual benefit. However, much of the research has focused on one school-university partnership at a time, hampering efforts to understand the broader findings and implications of their use. Furthermore, the foundational aspects of school-university partnerships – such as the factors that motivate the involvement of stakeholders within the partnership – have not yet been explicitly explored in either the Australian context or elsewhere