Collaborative practitioner research: opening a third space for local knowledge production

Early childhood education and care is currently experiencing unprecedented policy interest and expansion. This policy and practice landscape requires new forms of adaptive leadership, new spaces for production of the knowledge necessary for this changing context, and tools that can support the development of leadership qualities. This paper examines the potential of practitioner research to produce contextually relevant knowledge and to develop leadership capacity. Our findings show that collaborative practitioner research groups provide a relatively safe environment for the sharing of dilemmas and critical reflections. The practitioners who participated in this research wanted access to narratives of change in typically resourced early childhood contexts as well as in the more highly resourced settings that are more often reflected in academic research and literature. This suggests there is a need for much more of this work to be publicly available. These groups can generate the courage required to open practice based research to public critique. This, we argue is an important element of activist leadership. Collaborative practitioner research opens up the possibility for practitioners to position themselves as knowledge producers and to revitalize the knowledge base that informs teacher education in the academy. In supporting this move, academics need to position themselves as resource gathers and co-learners thus opening a third space for knowledge production. The challenges for the profession are how to fund and effectively disseminate collaborative practitioner research and how to draw it into dialogue with other forms of research.