Working in the Spaces In Between: Collaborative Writing as Inquiry in Youth and Community Work

Working in the Spaces In Between: Collaborative Writing as Inquiry in Youth and Community Work

Posted by IJSP Editorial Office on 2026-07-19

This blog post is to accompany the article titled 'Exploring the spaces in between critical and social pedagogy and its implications for learning and teaching in professionally qualifying youth and community work education'.

Authors: Christine Smith, Gill Hughes, Emily Duncan Mawdsley, Joe Marley, Shannan Mcleod, Emily Robinson

This article is the second to emerge from a collaborative writing project involving three different groups of final-year Youth and Community Work (YCW) students, alongside a graduate practitioner and university lecturers. The project began from a simple premise: placement practice is itself a significant site of knowledge creation. Yet too often, students' experiences are positioned primarily as evidence of learning, while professional knowledge is assumed to reside with academics, researchers or more experienced practitioners. Drawing on Mark Smith's (1982) distinction between creators and consumers, we wanted to work differently. Rather than treating students as consumers of professional knowledge, we collectively began from the premise that placement practice is itself a site of knowledge creation. Working alongside young people in rapidly changing social contexts, students were generating situated understandings that was informing their own practice, learning, research and wider debates within the profession. It was also contributing to the learning of teaching staff engaged in the process.

Drawing on Wyatt and Gale's (2017) concept of writing as a method of inquiry, we created a space where we could think and write together in relation to placement practice. Collaborative writing became a space for exploration, experimentation and dialogue. Rather than fixing ideas about practice, it enabled us to theorise together and remain open to what emerged through the inquiry and created spaces of inquiry that was not confined to the classroom or the teacher student binary.

The writing project reflected our wider commitment to learning and teaching as a collaborative endeavour. Rather than beginning with predetermined knowledge that students were expected to acquire before entering professional practice, we worked with the realities they were encountering in placement. Through dialogue, workshops and collaborative writing, placement became a site of inquiry where we explored, questioned and theorised YCW practices together. Practice was not treated as a place where theory was applied. Instead, theory and practice continually informed one another in the meaning making process as new understandings emerged through inquiry. In many ways, this reflected social pedagogy's understanding of the interconnectedness of the head, heart and hands (Brühlmeier and Mitchell, 2010), recognising that thinking, feeling and acting are inseparable within how youth and community work practice is constituted

This way of working also repositioned expertise. Rather than locating knowledge primarily within the university or privileging the academic as expert, collaborative inquiry recognised knowledge as emerging through dialogue, relationships and shared engagement with practice. The project unsettled assumptions about the sole academic author and, more fundamentally, questioned whose knowledge counts within the university and within the YCW profession more broadly. Rather than reinforcing familiar binaries between theory and practice, university and community, or lecturer and student, inquiry worked with the messy entanglements of these relationships. It was within these spaces in between that new understandings and possibilities for practice began to emerge.

As our inquiry unfolded, recurring questions began to surface. Rather than asking how existing theories might explain what was happening, we found ourselves asking what placement practice was making visible about YCW in contemporary contexts. Across diverse settings, students were engaged in a diverse range of relationships and making sense of the wider social and political realities shaping young people's lives. Throughout the writing process, our conversations repeatedly returned to relationships, which have long been recognised as central to YCW. Our inquiry, however, encouraged us to think beyond relationships as simply the foundation of effective practice and instead to explore their ethical, political and pedagogical possibilities.

YCW has also always been more than relationship building. Rooted in informal education and movements for social justice, it seeks to create the conditions for dialogue, collective action and social change. Relationships matter not simply because they foster trust and belonging, but because they create possibilities for challenging adultist assumptions and reworking unequal power relations. In this sense, relational practice is never neutral. It is orientated towards creating the conditions in which power can be tipped in favour of young people (Davies, 2015) as they critically understand their lives and act collectively on the issues shaping them.

These conversations about placement practices informed our article, Exploring the Spaces in Between Critical and Social Pedagogy in Youth and Community Work: Its Implications for Learning and Teaching (Smith et al., 2026). As we theorised practice together, we found ourselves working with questions of relationships, power, dialogue and social change. Rather than asking whether youth and community work is best understood through critical pedagogy or social pedagogy, we became interested in what practice was making possible in the spaces in between. It was through this inquiry that our articulation of Critical Social Pedagogy emerged.

Our inquiry also led us to extend Charfe's (2025) conceptualisation of the personal, professional and private. We argue that these alone do not fully capture the relational, political and praxis-oriented nature of YCW. We therefore introduce four further Ps: practice, political, praxis and process. Together, these contribute to our theorisation of Critical Social Pedagogy by recognising YCW as relational, political and continually shaped through practice.

In our paper we propose that rather than functioning as discrete categories, the seven Ps work relationally. They foreground practice as situated and relational, recognise the political realities shaping young people's lives, connect critical reflection with collective action through praxis, and understand process as the dynamic thread through which relationships, learning and change continually unfold. Collectively, they offer a way of theorising Critical Social Pedagogy that reflects a commitment to social justice as a movement for change and the, complexity and interconnected nature of YCW.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that an article exploring the spaces in between critical and social pedagogy emerged through a collaborative inquiry that was itself working those spaces: between university and community, theory and practice, writing and inquiry, student and lecturer. The collaborative writing project therefore became much more than a means of producing an academic paper. It became a relational process of inquiry that challenged assumptions about where knowledge is created and who gets to create it.

If YCW is rooted in dialogue, relationships and social change, then our approaches to learning and teaching should be too. We hope the article contributes to ongoing conversations about Critical Social Pedagogy while also encouraging wider reflection on whose knowledge counts, how practice generates theory, and what becomes possible when students, practitioners and academics work alongside one another as collaborators in inquiry.