Why a 3RDspace Matters

The 3RDspace is a powerful place. It exists between your existing capabilities, and, the advanced abilities you want to develop. If you like what you're doing, it's critical you learn to improve it. And we also need to know how and when to innovate.

 

First, we view our professional development work, our partnerships with communities and our research as 3RDspaces centered on harnessing ResponsiveDesign. From this perspective that joins space and process, we focus on develoing the habit of mind to enact, Durable Practices with a bias toward immediately improving learning opportunities for students. 

 

Second, we then help learning communities develop the capacity for nurturing courageous confidence by introducing 2 balancing habits of mind, explore and envision, which bring into play the power of creativity and innovation in ways that is accessible to all educators.

 

Third, because we are teacher-researchers, we bring a strong intellectual and theoretical tradition to the exploring, envisioning, enacting work we do. The 3RDspace draws on sociocultural perspectives on how to create powerful learning spaces, physical and process-oriented experiences, ones that learning theorists and researchers (e.g., Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development; Kris Gutierrez's Third Space; or Gloria Anzaldúa's use of Nepántla) have long named as important phenomena critical for learning transformations to happen.