With the continuing emphasis on lifelong learning within the European Community universities are expected to move away from traditional forms of teaching, associated with knowledge transfer, and to develop new approaches to pedagogy aimed at improving competences , particularly in the workplace (EC2002:42). This paper focuses on the operation of an innovative postgraduate masters degree. The MEd. Professional Enquiry in Education is a practice-based course aimed at enabling experienced teachers to achieve recognition as accomplished practitioners against the Standard for Chartered Teacher (SE 2002;Reeves 2007). Whilst the field of professional learning post initial qualification has attracted much greater attention in recent years it remains the case that examining processes that bring about changes in practice remains problematic given their complexity (Eraut, 1994;Adey, 2004; Cordingley et al, 2003). This paper focuses on issues of knowledge usage, exchange and creation within the system created by the MEd. activity which uses a hybrid pedagogy combining both schooling and developmental strategies. The aim of the study was to track what sense was being made of the notion of Professional Enquiry at this ‘location’ over a period of six years and to describe the dynamics of this process. The paper argues that the use of a hybrid system generated a reflexivity that provoked changes of practice across the various social spaces that it connected together, raising a number of issues about the nature of the knowledge that circulates in such systems and the possible relationship between hybrid pedagogic designs and other forms of epistemic system (Knorr Cetina, 1999) in developing competences as knowledge in action.

As a member of the tutor team for this programme I had access to a relatively complete set of longitudinal data. Using event and textual analysis (Chouliaraki and Fairclough,1999; Womak, 2000; Reeves and Boreham, 2006) these data have been used to map the spatial forms produced by the performance of the masters programme over a period of six years and to examine the network of relations within which it operates. By providing a visual means of tracking the movements of artefacts and people back and forth between the various spaces produced by the activity system the study surfaced the development and movement of ideas and information within it revealing the complex interrelationships that coming to know entailed in this case.

The resulting map showed how pervasive the movement and creation of knowledge was within the system and how it was encoded within distinctive genres according to the types of activity involved in four different sub-spaces. For knowledge that had longer term significance the metaphor of transfer from a site of creation to a site of consumption did not correspond with what appeared to be happening. For example, once ‘released’ by utterance the knowledge in a teaching space (tutor and students) travelled in a several directions and was combined and recombined with other ‘knowledges’ according to the objects of the various activity sets that used it (Bakhtin, 1981). By altering the relations between students and students, students and tutors and the different spaces they occupied this hybrid system raised interesting questions about the potentialities of a spatial approach to developing knowledge creating pedagogies.