Enhancing professional development for Third Space roles : reflections on the added value of Learning Circles

This paper explores how Learning Circles can support higher education staff in navigating the complexities of contemporary educational landscapes with greater confidence, creativity, and efficacy. It presents qualitative research rooted in the three-year Erasmus+ project CIRCLET, involving five European universities. Learning Circles were implemented as a core component of professional development programmes, aiming to foster quality integration of Community Engaged Research and Learning (CERL) in academic practice. Drawing on a collaborative autoethnographic research design, we reflected on our experiences as Learning Circle designers, facilitators, and participants to identify manifestations of professional growth emanating from our project activities. We build on four different Learning Circle examples, analysing their features through a Third Spaces lens. We demonstrate that Learning Circles have the potential to create agentic, distributed, and adaptive professional learning spaces, enabling participating staff in reimagining their professional space, so that they feel better prepared to assume the hybrid roles and responsibilities that practices of engagement typically entail. We put forward a number of guiding principles for Learning Circle facilitators, emphasising the importance of promoting inquiry-led approaches, embedded in day-to-day practice, fostering active participation and critical reflection on one’s positionality.