The medium became the message: the MEDAL project as learning space

Our contribution offers a retrospective glimpse into some perspectives on the MEDAL (Making a difference: educational development to enhance academic literacy) project, a three-year initiative that created a pedagogic network for childhood studies (CS), a new, complex and rapidly evolving area of research and undergraduate study. It aims to capture the sense of community that evolved throughout the project, because this underpinned our sense of the conceptual change and professional development that MEDAL brought about for the individuals working within it. Our narrative incorporates the core team’s perspectives and explores the ways that this group worked with others in a community that came to encompass members with a range of experiences, disciplines and backgrounds. In particular we will focus on the ways that MEDAL co-collaborators included students and emerging pedagogic writers, and highlight some of the common issues and ideas that emerged across the various electronic, physical and metaphorical spaces that the project developed. We draw on our own reflections and on data gathered by an independent researcher in interviews with staff and students, illuminating the ways in which MEDAL offered us what Savin-Baden (2007) calls “learning space”.