This chapter presents a global perspective on the role art museums as a Third Space in the teaching/learning process, in addition to the first and second spaces of home and the traditional classroom. After a theoretical explanation of Third Space, the chapter introduces the concept of art museum settings as third spaces for inquiry-based core curriculum teaching/learning, including a review of the literature on the historical and contemporary understanding of art museums as a Third Space. Next follows a discussion of how art museums in various countries are offering a wide spectrum of teaching-learning experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible in the second space of the traditional classroom settings, and thereby have transitioned from being a pedagogy of only geographical out-of-classroom space to a pedagogy of a true educational Third Space. The chapter concludes with an argument for the importance of using art museums as Third Space for teaching core curriculum, with an emphasis on the future acceptance of Third Space into traditional teaching-learning pedagogy.
A “third pedagogical site is inclusive rather than exclusive, it is ambiguous
rather than clear, it is abnormal rather than normal, it is anti-structural rather than
structural” (Turner, 1982, p. 20).
TopThird Space
The concept of Third Space in education has emerged from the sociocultural tradition in psychology identified with Lev Vygotsky (1962), who theorized that sociocultural approaches in learning are concerned with the “... constitutive role of culture in mind, i.e., on how mind develops by incorporating the community’s shared artifacts accumulated over generations” (Hatano & Wertsch, 2001, p. 78).
In contemporary usage, “Third Space” represents a postcolonial theory of identity and community realized through education, and is primarily attributed to Homi K. Bhabha (2004), who defined the uniqueness of each person, actor, or context as a mixture of identity or “hybridity” (p. 55). Bhabha applied the needs of the community to this hybrid condition, where there are often “... unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation” (p. 245). Accordingly, Third Space was theorized as “the process of cultural hybridity giving rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation” (Rutherford, 1990, p. 211). Bhabha’s theory continues to be revisited (Bhandari, 2022; Xiaowei Zhou & Pilcher, 2019) in postcolonial investigations of crossing or meeting points of cultures.
Soja (1996), in turn, conceptualized the term “Thirdspace” within the social sciences, viewing it from an urban theory perspective:
we are becoming increasingly aware that we are and always have been spatial beings, active participants in the social construction of our embracing spatialities. (p. 1)
According to Soja’s theory of Third Space (1996), spatial thinking, or the geographical or spatial imagination, has tended to be bicameral; that is, confined to two approaches. Specifically, it is either viewed as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, and explained or as mental constructs, ideas about and representations of space and its social significance. Re-evaluating this dualism, Soja created an alternative approach, one that includes both the material and mental dimensions of spatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modes of spatial thinking.
In general, Third Space is seen by educational theorists as a bridge between home and community funds of knowledge (first space) and school-based discourse (second space). As such, it can be viewed as the theoretical basis of a scaffold used to move students through zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1962) toward better inquiry-based knowledge (the Third Space).