38
dominant discourses, by entering into a space of improvised, dialogical exchange.
For Gutiérrez, the teacher’s ‘script’ is spoken from the first—or official—space.
Students’ ‘counterscripts’ are spoken from the second, unofficial space. Both these
spaces are ultimately dominated, however, by the ‘transcendent script’ that is soci-
ety’s overarching hegemonic discourse. For Gutiérrez et al., the third space is
Bhaktin’s ‘heteroglossia’, an unscripted space where ‘“what counts as knowledge”
is negotiated between student and teacher, and the possibility of contesting a larger
societal, or transcendent, script emerges’ (p. 452). In this context, teachers are not
the agents of colonisation, imperialism or hegemony. Rather, the teacher’s position-
ing in the third space is just as vital as that of students in challenging hegemony
through the improvisation of hybrid knowledges and understandings that emerge
through authentic dialogue.
Beyond its classroom applications, Gutiérrez’s third space theory offers a way of
theorising dialogue as strategy for recognising and rebalancing the power differen-
tials in professional experience relationships (e.g. mentor/mentee, teacher/teacher
educator and teacher/student) that see some speak the official script and others the
unofficial counterscript. But perhaps even more useful to professional experience
research is that Gutiérrez’s approach recognises that even within the power differ-
entials of these relationships, the agency of all social actors participating in the
professional experience is determined by a transcendent script that they cannot con-
trol, only challenge through dialogue and genuine exchange. Thus, a third space of
improvised dialogue may offer new opportunities in the context of developing a
partnership agenda.
Exploring the Use of Third Space Theory in Teacher
Education Research into Professional Experience
Partnerships
In the previous section, we offered an analysis of the disciplinary origins of third
space, and we began to theorise some of the possibilities and limitations of applying
each of these third space theories to teacher education professional experience part-
nership research. We now go on to offer a systematic, critical review of data-driven
teacher education studies in which third space theory was, indeed, applied.
The review was driven by the central inquiry: how has third space theory been
taken up in teacher education research into professional experience partnerships
since its application by Zeichner in 2010? Searches within education databases
identified 15 papers published between 2010 and early 2016 that referred explicitly
to the third space as it applies to teacher education, with specific focus on the pro-
fessional experience partnership dimension of teacher education. We systematically
coded the papers’ definitions and applications of third space theory in order to offer
a critical analysis of the uptake of third space theory in professional experience
research.
R. Forgasz et al.