Section 8: Third space theory
The concept of ‘third space’ has been utilised in an attempt to understand what happens when popular cultural texts are incorporated into the school curriculum. The concept of ‘third space’ was first developed in depth by Bhabha (1994) as a metaphor for the space in which cultures met. It is a space in which colonial authority is challenged and hybrid identities are created. This space is not a cohesive one; Bhabha stresses that it is a site of tension, of competing powers and of insurmountable differences:
The non-synchronous temporality of global and national cultures opens up a cultural space - a third space - where the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences…
(Bhabha, 1994:218)
The concept of third space has been used to explore how the diverse worlds of home and nursery or school can be brought together in educational settings. In this conceptualisation, home is one space, the educational institution is a second space, and the classroom in which home and school cultures meet can be seen as a third space. In relation to literacy education, Gutiérrez et al. (1999) have used third space theory to explore how the different cultural spaces children inhabit can be brought together in the classroom, rather than these domains remaining distinct. Moje et al. (2004), however, argue that this position emphasises the importance of the third space as a site for introducing children to the discourses of power, rather than seeing it as a metaphor for a space in which new, hybrid and challenging discourses are created. Instead, Moje et al. (2004) suggest that the third space of classrooms should be perceived as a place in which academic discourses are challenged and re-shaped, but also give rise to the reconstitution of the everyday, out-of-school knowledge of learners. This process has also been referred to as a ‘transformative pedagogy of literacy fusion’ by Millard (2003:6), who suggests that children’s out-of-school interests can be fused with schooled literacy in classroom practice that pays attention to what happens when the two textual worlds collide.
Student teachers could be asked to read the Millard paper:
- MILLARD E. (2003) Transformative Pedagogy: Towards a Literacy of Fusion Reading, Literacy and Language, Vol 37, no 1, pp 3-9.
They could then be asked to answer the following questions:
- What is meant by the phrase ‘literacy fusion’?
- Does this phrase accurately convey what might happen when popular culture is used in the literacy curriculum?
- Why is this seen as ‘transformative pedagogy’?
- What are the challenges identified by the author to this work?
 
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