Hybrid Learning Developers: Between the Discipline and the Third Space

Abstract

Learning Developers who practise alongside an academic role as hybrid professionals occupy a unique position in higher education: at home in both the academic and professional worlds. This distinctive location involves constant boundary crossing as they negotiate the challenges and advantages of straddling and travelling between two or more worlds. This chapter conceptualises hybrid practitioners as a distinctive group operating within the Learning Development (LD) community and engages in the assessment of how blended roles inform and enrich respective practices. It captures how, at the core of hybrid identity, lies a capacity to switch between the established power hierarchies related to discipline-focused work and the third space of Learning Development. Through the lenses of identity (which can never be fixed), practice (which must span boundaries adaptively), wellbeing, and future prospects (which in some ways are opened up and in other ways are limited) and hybrids sense of belonging (with reference to stepping beyond each space and not quite letting go), this analysis affirms the richness of experience, the value of contribution, and the uniqueness of insight that hybrid Learning Developers can offer the larger LD community and academia as a whole.