Third Space and Sociocritical Literacy

Emergence of the Concept

The concept of the third space has emerged across academic disciplines, with various nuanced differences in the meaning of the term. In cultural studies, Homi Bhabha used the concept to promote new understandings of hybridity in which notions of essentialism are challenged; culture from this perspective is continually in the process of hybridization rather than remaining static. Edward Soja, in critical geography, imagines third space as a transdisciplinary construct in which spatiality is imbued with sociality and historicality to examine the micro-geographical, political, and social dimensions of everyday life. Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa used a related idea of nepantla to theorize the liminal terrain or borderlands “in-between” psychological, spiritual, and epistemic spaces—the ambiguous state of living/being in-between various classed, raced, or gendered positions or identities that can promote a redefinition of self. In educational contexts, Kris Gutiérrez, Betsy Rymes, and Joanne Larson initially conceptualized the third space as a space where two scripts, those of the teacher and the student, intersect to create a hybrid space with the potential for authentic interaction that promotes meaningful learning. Common across these conceptualizations is the attempt to exceed epistemological dualisms, as Carmen Luke and Allan Luke argue. With attention to the disruption of unproductive binaries, the third space allows for expansion and transformation, both individually and collectively.

Third Space in Education

The notion of third space first emerged in 1995 through the work of Gutiérrez, Rymes, and Larson. In their microanalysis of high school classroom activity, language and interaction are understood as mediators of learning that are central to the social organization of the classroom context. While acknowledging the larger metanarratives and systemic structures and practices, understandings of third space were theorized by focusing on the ways power relations are constructed, cocon-structed, and reconstructed through the micro-politics of the classroom. Informed by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the authors advanced the premise that classrooms are naturally multivoiced. However, the inherent heteroglossia of the classrooms is generally ignored or suppressed in traditionally organized classrooms, where forms of monologism are reinforced and sustained by the normative practices of schooling. The potential for monologic classroom discourses is further exacerbated by primary, or official scripts, organized and informed by the teacher's habitus. These classed sensibilities and practices both reinforce the asymmetrical power structures in the classroom while also privileging and shaping what counts as knowledge. Building on Erving Goffman's construct of the underlife to examine the various discourses of the classroom, this theorization of the third space helped to make evident how identities are interwoven and intimately connected to historically constructed power relations and spaces that exist both within and between spheres of cultural practice. These analyses are crucial to problematizing classroom learning activity and illustrating the ways this emergent hybrid space, the third space, disrupts the teacher–student binary and promotes the local coconstruction of knowledge and a transcendent script.

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