The emergence of a digital third space: Opportunities and constraints of digital practice assessment in teacher education

Practitioners and policymakers worldwide emphasise the need for research-based and professionally relevant teacher education, highlighting the importance of integrating epistemologies across schools and teacher education institutions. Drawing on the affordance concept, this study qualitatively investigates the perceived opportunities and constraints of Digital Practice Assessment (DPA) as a collaborative platform for triads of pre-service teachers, school-based and university-based teacher educators. It explores the perspectives of these stakeholders on the use of technology in teaching practice assessment and examines how their collaboration within these triads can facilitate the emergence of a third space. The third space is a metaphor that denotes the meeting place of epistemologies from research and practice in teacher education, where all stakeholders’ voices are heard. This examination sheds light on the potential benefits and challenges that DPA brings to the assessment process and highlights the importance of understanding the interplay between technology, collaboration, and professional development in teacher education. Through video-stimulated recall interviews of the assessment sessions, we show how recordings of teaching practice offer opportunities such as detailed feedback, enhanced reflections, and knowledge sharing, which are essential to research-based and practice-oriented teacher education. However, certain constraints were identified, such as the lack of contextual information and rigid roles within the assessment process. Still, despite the summative nature of DPA, our findings suggest that it has the potential to integrate formative assessment to foster the emergence of a third space and to support the development and learning of pre-service teachers.