Whilst various opportunities are afforded by activities such as conferences, seminars and funding calls to facilitate research dialogue, less attention has been given to opportunities that may facilitate such conversations in learning and teaching. Moreover, these opportunities tend to focus on formal spaces and places, such as pedagogy-focused conferences, events and networks. Although we retain an interest in the opportunities presented at these official spaces, in this paper we focus on the informal -  everyday, occluded, opportunities for discursive learning and teaching encounters in higher education. We examine the role these ‘micro-moments’ of a teacher’s life play in offering space for learning and teaching dialogue. Such encounters might include informal ‘corridor’ conversations, team discussions about aspects of learning and teaching, or one-to-one meetings, within or beyond institutional contexts.

Drawing on this background, our paper discusses a research study which was completed in 2021 using the photovoice research method, and which seeks to address the following questions:

1. What informal spaces and places enable conversations, connections and decisions about learning and teaching to take place?

2. What do these informal spaces and places tell us about the working lives of teachers in higher education?

3. Drawing on the informal, how have connections between teachers, colleagues and students changed in view of the altered landscape of the Covid-19 pandemic?

We engage with the concept of ‘micro-moments’, as conceptualised by Gannon et al. (2019, p. 49) and who describe how such moments: “provide insights into how our bodies, and the academic labour they do, are saturated with affects and emotions. How they are entangled with the concrete specificities of material spaces and objects, and the part played by joy informing the subjectivities of those who enacted the academic dramas within them”. 

Our findings are considered against a backdrop of the ongoing disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, when enforced isolation of staff resulting from the closure of campuses meant that opportunities for interaction assumed greater significance. Our aim is to foreground those spaces and places of interaction which enable us to better manage the challenges of working within higher education. We examine how these micro-moments may be significant to university teachers’ professional development and well-being, and consider the future of such spaces and places of learning and teaching dialogue in post-pandemic times. Making space for conversations and connections within the ‘cracks’ of higher education (Bottrell and Manathunga, 2019) may hold important potential to develop teaching practice and academics’ well-being. The intention is to highlight the value of such encounters to teachers, senior managers, academic development units and other stakeholders so that they actively seek to facilitate such spaces if institutions wish to promote a genuine engagement with learning and teaching alongside research.

Whilst the project was undertaken by UK-based colleagues, it is equally relevant to broader European and international contexts. The international dimension is accounted for in the literature we utilised to frame our study and in the diverse backgrounds of our participants.

Design: We employed an approach inspired by the creative and participatory photovoice method, to examine the everyday, occluded, opportunities for learning and teaching dialogue. Photovoice enabled us to generate a compendium of rich case studies, as identified by teachers, which contribute to their pedagogical development and consequently, potentially, enhance the student learning experience. This method also enabled us better understand the ‘socio-material assemblages’ (Gourlay and Oliver, 2018) that surround the spaces and places of learning and teaching. Photovoice itself is an example of a visual research method that holds value for eliciting different and additional information from that which can be gleaned by more commonly adopted methods such as interviews (Wass et al. 2019). In practice, it involves participants capturing “photographs of things they associate with and/or practice as part of the community to which they belong, and thus give ‘voice’ to their collective experiences for the purposes of knowledge creation” (Waight 2020, p. 180). We were keen to know what micro-moments might ‘look like’ and how they may be ‘materially felt’. The scope of our study was the diverse, international, community of teachers working in higher education, and we sought to provide a space for teachers to share their photographs and experiences. The project followed BERA ethical guidelines (2018) and was granted ethical approval by the principal investigator’s institutional ethics committee. Implementation: Thirteen staff accepted our invitation to participate in the study. These participants included a diverse group of teachers from the UK, Turkey and Japan, who had varied levels of higher education experience. Participants were provided with written information which invited them to take one or more photographs of everyday spaces that captured a learning and teaching conversation or discursive encounter that has been meaningful to them. They were encouraged to consider the role of these spaces and places in creating dialogic opportunities for support and professional development. They were also asked to write a short reflective narrative to accompany their photograph/s, drawing out the meaning and value of the image. The images therefore became the reference point for participants to elaborate on the spaces and micro-moments they identified as promoting learning and teaching conversations.

The purpose of our project was to draw attention to what higher education teachers perceive to represent authentic, yet often unrecognised, opportunities for connection and support. Participants’ chosen photographs represented a broad range of different interactions including outdoor meetings, offices, a laboratory, classrooms, kitchens, a café and a lobby, many also reflecting the ‘pandemic context’ in which they were taken - away from ‘traditional’ working contexts. Following a collaborative analysis by the researchers, our findings were organised under four themes: • Affective connections: pleasure, power, trust and joy. • Nature, the outdoors and well-being. • The professional and private: a blurring of boundaries. • Material matters - how spaces and the material intersect and intra-act (Barad 2007). We will also suggest that the findings have value in at least two capacities: • Supporting the pedagogical development of staff. The outcomes will help identify what places and spaces teaching staff consider as valuable in supporting their pedagogical development. • Improving student learning experience. The spaces for pedagogical development of staff and the opportunities they afford for dialogue will facilitate the development of teaching ideas which should be valuable for the enhancement and enrichment of student learning. With the project completed, we will offer reflections and conclusions about our data, which highlight the range of spaces and places where connections occur, and how these spaces open up new opportunities. Our study emphasises the importance of learning and teaching encounters as an integral aspect supporting teachers’ feelings of connection and well-being. It also surfaces the complexity of the blurring of boundaries between the personal and the professional, one that has been hightened as a result of the Covid pandemic.

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