Search

The article critically examines how design is used as a tool to establish a new brand of American Islamic spaces in situated contexts using four strategic mechanisms: (1) Using place as a means of institutionalizing the inclusive vision of the community; (2) Urbanizing the location by moving away from the suburbs, making it accessible to all; (3) Co-designing the space to foster ownership; (4) reflecting a new brand of space through contextually sensitive interiors. Findings suggest that these four community-based mechanisms were used to enact a vernacular brand of Islamic spaces in the US through communicating an inclusive hidden program of space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the notions of transmedia storytelling and engagement, this study investigates how practitioners engage with the process of producing and consuming boys' love (BL) audio dramas, the trans-directional communication and interaction between producers and consumers in the transmedia BL subcultural space, and the implications of their engagement for counterculture. We contribute to the growing field of BL studies by providing insights into how practitioners can stimulate these cultural productions as a part of gender–sexuality-related counterculture in the new media space of audio dramas. We argue that the engagement of BL audio drama producers and consumers ('prosumers') features the sense of countering the predominant heteronormativity in China by producing explicit homosexual romance, actively expanding the story elements transmedially, and bringing queer members into the BL audio drama community. In this way, built by both producers and consumers together, the BL audio drama community is no longer a female-only area, but becomes a more inclusive 'third' space constituted by people with diverse sexual identities and orientations. Given its knowledge, perspectives, and experiences, the BL audio drama community, as a countercultural group, has a certain potential to bridge the divide between the female-led BL subculture and the larger queer community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of liminal spaces in Tokyo, specifically focusing on gaming arcades as transitional spaces between social isolation and integration. The decline of the once-popular arcades since the 1990s raises questions about their usage, accessibility, and affordability in contemporary Tokyo. After clarifying the concept of liminality and urban borderlands, the article examines various case studies in central Tokyo, argues that arcades serve diverse purposes and highlights the importance of reintegration of such liminal spaces to bring people from different backgrounds together, providing entertainment, competition, and ritualized encounters. Employing ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, interviews, and secondary data analysis, this study recognizes the gaming arcade not only as a physical but also as a mental and social space. The arcades embody the hopes, fears, and aspirations of their users, blur boundaries, offer immersive experiences, and foster a sense of community, comfort, and nostalgia. Such insights allow us to understand how identities are constructed and negotiated in these spaces. In conclusion, the article advocates for a nuanced approach to urban planning that recognizes the value of subcultural spaces like gaming arcades and emphasizes the need to preserve and integrate these spaces into the broader urban fabric. By doing so it can be understood how these liminal spaces can contribute to a diversity of social interactions, community-building, and a better understanding and revitalization of urban borderlands if integrated and managed in the right way.

In recent decades, an increasingly significant break in the bond that binds politics and subjects has been affirmed. An increasing number of citizens have distanced themselves from politics and its party drift and have ceased to recognize themselves in it and in its institutional representatives. This process has pushed the subjects towards individualistic orientations and privatization of the experience. The increasingly low level of political culture of the citizens, both outcome and cause of the growing disaffection and deresponsibilization, exposes to the risk of an increasingly demagogic, populist and low democratic policy. The last decades, therefore, have undermined the conditions for the existence of a "critical citizen", a priority objective to ensure fully democratic decision-making and government processes. The goal of a full and widespread democratic participation requires training courses of political culture, starting from a rethinking and a redesign of the times and spaces of training so that widespread conditions of learning knowledge and skills elicitation for a full voice are guaranteed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Language & Intercultural Communication is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This year-long multiple case study examines how three elementary-level ESL teachers understood their advocacy for emerging bilinguals, what tensions arose during their advocacy, and how they dealt with those tensions. Interviews, teaching artefacts, and observations were analyzed using a theoretical model informed by third space theory and existing research on teachers' critically conscious advocacy. The way that these teachers conceptualized their advocacy (i.e. non-critical, critically emerging, and critically conscious) was tied to the tensions that they encountered as advocates (i.e. advocacy as core versus marginal ideas; advocacy beliefs versus actions; ideological alignment versus misalignment). Teacher participants often dealt with tensions by engaging with stakeholders in third spaces, which are hybrid zones between formal and informal spaces of social interactions. Some of the actions that teacher participants took within third spaces included co-constructing new cultural knowledge with emerging bilinguals' families; building bridges between the school and their students' communities; and reimagining alternative practices. This study shows that third spaces can help teachers and stakeholders to jointly identify tensions stemming from divergent goals and help them to collaborate in advocating for emerging bilinguals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of households experiencing fuel poverty is thought to have risen by at least 600,000 in the UK because of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The concentration of fuel poor households in poor quality, energy inefficient accommodation that they have little power to improve means they are particularly negatively affected by the retreat into the home brought about by successive lockdowns and restrictions. For many such households, the home is not the place of sanctuary that it needs to be at a time like this. However, our empirical research into the lived experiences of fuel poverty reveals additional consequences for fuel poor households, chiefly associated with restricted access to third spaces and other disruptions to their usual coping strategies. Based on our evidence, we highlight three key considerations for policy on fuel poverty in the era of Covid-19: the need to rapidly upgrade the energy performance of the existing housing stock; the need to address the additional financial hardship faced by fuel poor households; and the need to prioritise access to third spaces and high-quality public spaces while restrictions last. This paper develops the concept of energy poverty by considering the role of spaces outside the home as part of the overall experience of energy poverty and the range of ways in which policy makers can mitigate its impacts.

Informed by the stories of transnational youth's participation in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) in Mexico, this study explores the language/identity development and successful (re)integration of these youth in Mexican schools and communities. Drawing on students' voices, we utilize a multimodal systemic functional linguistics framework to explain how engagement in MMORPGs allows youth to creatively demonstrate fields of knowledge and critically reposition themselves with positive in-the-moment and imagined identities. We call for teachers to create third spaces for youth to meet and play MMORPGs. Findings suggest that creating these blended affinity spaces may create opportunities for transnational youth to translanguage, find sanctuary within peer-interest-based communities of practice, maintain meaningful online connections with friends in the United States, form new important friendships, and create the identities needed for successful (re)integration in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Switzerland, like other countries in Europe, has long depended on migration and mobility for its economy. Facilitating the integration of migrant children in school, primarily through the acquisition of the local language, has therefore been a priority for policymakers. In recent years, mobility has been on the increase and mobility trajectories have become more diverse. A growing percentage of families arriving in the country have experienced repeated mobility and may not plan to settle in Switzerland for good. This paper examines institutional responses to the increasing number of mobile children in Swiss public schools, in particular, the manner in which such children are welcomed. It presents the main findings of an exploratory research project focused on children in repeated mobility, defined as having lived in multiple countries before their arrival in Switzerland, regardless of family background or legal status. Adopting a sociocultural psychological approach, the paper examines the macro-social level of cantonal educational policies regarding welcome processes, the meso-social level of local school policies, and the microsocial level of teachers' practices and interactions in classrooms that welcome mobile children. Data include documentary analysis, interviews, and observations. Our analysis shows that a deficit view of mobile children and the preoccupation with language proficiency dominate policies and practices, resulting in the diversion of mobile children into special integration classes (so called "classes d'accueil" in the French speaking region, and "Integrationsklasse" in the Swiss German-speaking region). Mobility is conceptualized by Swiss policymakers, school directors, and teachers in terms of its challenges. In particular, school directors and teachers conceptualize mobility as increasing heterogeneity of the classroom. However, the situation varies greatly according to the personal orientations of school directors and teachers' personal engagement. The paper emphasizes the ambiguous role of the integration classes: while they may impair the long-term chances of educational success by reducing academic expectations for non-native-speaking mobile children, they may also be used as "third spaces" which afford pedagogical freedom for dedicated teachers, potentially of benefit for children. The paper examines these propositions in the light of sociocultural educational literature and draws upon the case of welcoming mobile children to question a series of assumptions about the ultimate purposes of public schooling in Europe today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a comparative content analysis of political talk in three popular Chinese online forums (government-run, commercial-lifestyle, and commercial-topical), this paper investigates how the private and public spheres are connected thru everyday talk about childcare concerns. Compared to the government-run (party-state) forum, the nonpolitical (lifestyle and topical) forums created open and inclusive 'third spaces' for citizens to engage in child welfare politics. In such spaces, the reason, rule-based deliberation was not the dominant communicative practice. Rather, political (narrative) acts of complaining and sharing personal concerns – grounded in citizens' life experiences – were the norm, capturing and recognizing public problems in the private sphere. We argue that to understand the nature of political talk in Chinese third spaces, communicative acts that have not been considered central to deliberative reasoning, such as complaining and sharing personal concerns should be given more normative importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editorial of this third issue of the Journal of Awareness-Based Systems Change is entitled "From Duality to Complementarity," which we read as one of the central themes running through all of the contributions in this issue. It starts of by positioning the condition of our planet and current time as one of polycrisis, whose genesis defies being reduced to singular causes. We contend that Awareness-Based Systems Change as an inherently hybrid inter- and transdisciplinary field can support the co-creation of new action motivating narratives. To that end, and in order to conceive “the unbearable complexity of the world” this calls us to create, hold and tune-into spaces that are shaped by, produce and nurture a multiplicity of meanings and ways of knowing.,

We examine one innovative response to the social, spatial and environmental sustainability challenges posed by food provisioning and consumption for large-scale organisations—pop-up or mobile food provisioning—focusing on the specific example of a large, inner urban university campus in Melbourne, Australia. Emerging from a larger project examining sustainability and eating practices on campus, this study of pop-ups draws on a multi-method empirical investigation involving ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and digital methods. While the university's use of pop-ups in this case has been primarily as a flexible, just-in-time way of engaging with the food needs of students during a large-scale campus rebuild, we argue that the mobile and malleable nature of pop-ups may offer a more sustainable way of envisaging eating spaces in urban organisational contexts. Drawing on conceptual frameworks taken from social practice theories and theories of space, the paper conceptualises the hybrid and convivial spaces produced through the bundling of mobile food provisioning practices with the university practices as third spaces of hybrid hospitality and urban commons. We argue that through disrupting and challenging many of the temporal and spatial norms that govern mainstream food provisioning and consumption, these third spaces can enable pathways to sustainable social practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agency of mapping has been an increasingly relevant area of enquiry in architecture, urbanism and landscape at the very least since James Corner published his seminal paper on the agency of mapping in 1999. A few projects aiming to map the commons in cities have since developed, providing critical or counter-cartographies in which information on local groups and communities, activities and other informal evidence is collated.This paper draws on the concept of urban commons as third places in the sense of being beyond market or state control and management, on the notion that commons cannot exist without commoning practices and on the idea of common spaces as distinct from public, private or communal ones. As such, urban commons should be mapped not as static or invariable but rather as dynamic entities that evolve over time. From that perspective, the agency of mapping should take into consideration both current commoning practices and places suitable for these agencies to happen. Spatial features and architectural configurations may also play a role in calling for, or hosting, those agencies.This paper proposes a methodology based on both primary and secondary data collection. The former is based on a variety of methods and tactics including psycho-geographical tours, non-interactive and interactive forms of observations and mapping. The process of mapping aims to showcase both what is already taking place and possibilities for future uses as a "hidden potential." The findings include the identification of specific places where several layers converge. These may become case studies that can be further investigated through methods such as research by design and community engagement.

Editorial for CPCL Vol 2, no 2 (2019) The New Spaces of the Common: Spatial and Political Models of "Making"

English Teacher Candidates’ Constructions of Third Spaces in a Reflection‑Enhancing Duoethnographic Project Duo‑ethnography is a research methodology, through which people of difference recon‑ ceptualise their histories of a particular phenomenon in juxtaposition with one another. Al‑ though initiated by researchers, duo‑ethnographies can also be used by students as a useful pedagogic tool that develops deep reflection. After discussing the efficacy of duo‑ethnog‑ raphy, a one‑semester‑long duo‑ethnographic project is described, which was conducted by the author with six preservice English teachers. The study consisted of four stages and the object of focus in this article is the English teacher candidates’ creation of third spaces in their duoethnographic conversations. The examples of the generated third spaces are discussed, as well as limitations and possible implications of this study.

In 1940s America, along the Texas-Mexico border, las escuelitas – or little schools – were places Mexican American parents sent their young children to begin their academic learning. These escuelitas, however, were no ordinary schools. They did not teach students to read, write, and speak in English. Rather, they sought to develop, maintain and celebrate the linguistic and cultural heritage of the communities they served by teaching students a Mexican inspired curriculum exclusively in Spanish. Through narrative inquiry, we explore the escuelitas, as experienced and recounted by nine former escuelita students, as sites of negotiation, agency, and resistance. Drawing on theories of Third Space and nepantla, we explore the ways in which the escuelitas participants take up/put to use the knowledge they acquired at the escuelitas to enact third spaces in order to navigate hegemonic institutions. We underscore the complexity of these experiences by contextualizing the escuelitas historically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational Asian adoptees are a unique and understudied population that potentially faces oppression and confusion. Educational institutions are often unresponsive to the needs of immigrant groups, particularly ones with unique circumstances like transnational Asian adoptees. Not only is there a gap generally in the critical and empirical literature across fields when it comes to this population, but it is almost entirely missing from the educational literature. This conceptual paper contributes a better understanding of transnational adoptees through a third space framework. We seek to critically analyze and synthesize the literature on transnational Asian adoptees. The outcome of the investigation bridges the adoption and education literature, situating it within the educational context. In doing so, we present educational implications of transnational Asian adoption that lay the groundwork for much needed empirical analyses.

The Indian Government's 12th Five Year Plan features ambitious goals regarding the upskilling of women in India. While the Plan acknowledges Indian women's continued inequality, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) programmes (a main avenue for upskilling) pose considerable challenges. There is significant work to be done if India aspires to meet the 12th Plan's goals. Moreover, to achieve them in a socially just manner, greater efforts are required to include and amplify women's voices throughout the process. In pursuit of this aim, the authors of this research note share insights from the first stages of their study of an upskilling programme in the non-formal education sector. They argue for a bottom-up approach to understand how women wish to participate in this programme and in government-recognised TVET more broadly. To understand the women's perspectives, the authors use the notions of third-space frameworks and "scapes". These concepts go beyond simply acknowledging the need for labour upskilling and offer opportunities to critique gender biases, stereotypes and patriarchal practices, while formulating new ideas about how to engage as active participants in Indian society. Based on these insights, the authors offer a path forward by directly engaging with women on the ground level, using a bottom-up approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally media production with young people has been characterized by an aspiration to 'give voice' or 'empower youth', but this core value is under threat. Recently, the rationale for undertaking youth media production has shifted to focus on enabling young people to acquire digital and entrepreneurial skills that serve the needs of rapidly changing creative industry / gig economy. In this paper, we challenge this rationale by sharing qualitative data from a young people's media production project run in libraries in a city in the United Kingdom where participants were invited to create video games/stories. We adopt Potter and McDougall's notion of Third Spaces as negotiated, contested and political to enable us to identify the ways in which pedagogical choices of setting, software and style of facilitation combined to support young people's critical and creative engagement with digital media and society. We re frame notions of third spaces, seeing less a bridge between linguistic and cultural domains, arguing instead that Third Spaces are productively disruptive. We conclude by proposing a new set of pedagogical principles for critical reflection in the development and funding of digital media production with young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines small scale green spaces developed on underutilised land in the inner city, looking at the ways in which familiar domestic outdoor design characteristics have been used for placemaking in what is essentially a commercial setting. Using case studies situated in Adelaide, South Australia, this research explores both the development and characteristics of small commercial or community inner city green spaces, how they have aided revitalisation through imaginative treatments of leftover spaces, and the integration of stories and nostalgia in place creation. One of the potential benefits of nurturing such small scale green interventions in our cities are the impacts on wellbeing, not only for those who are resident in the city, but also for those who work there, study in or visit the city. The focus of the article is an investigation of how three case studies – a café, a bar and a community garden – have brought a sense of home into the commercial centre of the city, specifically in terms of the placemaking and urban design moves that have been employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experiences of a group of academic developers who support educational development work as Faculty Liaisons at a large, research-intensive university. These academic developers inhabit complex 'third spaces', providing support through an embedded partnership relationship that requires lateral movement across functional and organizational boundaries to create new professional spaces, knowledge, and relationships. The authors utilize narrative inquiry and auto-ethnographic approaches to present an interpretive qualitative analysis of their experiences supporting Faculty and University projects across complex and evolving organizational boundaries. From this analysis, they highlight key roles and responsibilities associated with their blended context and identify challenges that academic developers who occupy third spaces within academic organizations face as they negotiate competing interests, identities, and requirements associated with the diverse range of their projects and the blended experience of working in scholarly and administrative, central- and Faculty-based roles. The lessons they have learned from these experiences will be of particular interest to academic developers who are experiencing the flux of change within higher education settings that are impacting teaching and learning practices both for faculty in the classroom and for those across the institution who support them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will man eine Sonntagsöffnung öffentlicher Bibliotheken ermöglichen, so ist dies ohne gesetzgeberische Maßnahmen nicht möglich. Soll neben der bloßen Öffnung des Gebäudes auch Bibliothekspersonal am Sonntag beschäftigt werden, kann auf eine arbeitszeitrechtliche Regelung nicht verzichtet werden. Solange der Bund hier keine Neubestimmung der Ausnahmen in § 10 ArbZG vornimmt, bleibt für die Länder nur der Weg über eine Regelung in eigenen Bedarfsgewerbeverordnungen. Nordrhein-Westfalen wird diesen Weg nach Hessen als zweites Bundesland beschreiten. Im Gegensatz zu Hessen wurde die geplante Regelung aber sorgfältiger ausgearbeitet und begründet. Ob dies einen Rechtsstreit wie im Fall Hessens verhindern wird, bleibt abzuwarten. Nicht unrealistisch ist allerdings die Überlegung, dass die Neuregelung in Nordrhein-Westfalen nach Jahren des Stillstandes endlich auch auf der Bundesebene zu einer überfälligen Novelle des Arbeitszeitgesetzes führt. Without further legislative action, Sunday opening in public libraries is impossible. Regulating opening hours of the library building is not in itself sufficient, it will be necessary to ensure that library staff can work on Sundays as well. This requires a new legislation on working hours. With the legal reorganisation of the exemption clause in § 10 ArbZG by the German federal government still pending, the federal states will have to regulate Sunday working hours through their own commercial state laws. The second federal state after Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia is prepared to embark on this process. The planned regulation will be further specified and substantiated than in the Hessian case. It remains to be seen whether a legal dispute like the one caused in Hesse can thus be prevented. However, it is not unrealistic to think that a new regulation on working hours in North Rhine-Westphalia could also lead to the long overdue amendment of the Working Hours Act at federal level after years of deadlock in the matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents research findings exploring discursive qualities of political talk on migration and Islam in a female-dominated parenting forum. Approaching the concept of 'third spaces' from a feminist perspective, it aims at revealing whether the primarily non-political online forum serves as a sheltered environment for women who are marginalized in online political discussions in other spaces. The results of our content analysis show that despite a very high level of incivility in the parenting forum, women create a space in which they protect themselves from harmful personal attacks and humiliation and that the participating male minority seems to respect this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past 15 years public libraries have undergone a transformation from being places where people lend books and other media to becoming a new type of low-threshold cultural institution in the sense of „third spaces". Today they are places for learning, lending and intercultural as well as intergenerational encounters with their respective functions. As public institutions, modern libraries are in the same rank with museums, scientific libraries, theatres and cinemas. However, in contrast to these institutions, libraries are not allowed to open on Sundays. It is time for a change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts to understand contemporary religious practice, and its associated communities and identities, must take into consideration the way that these phenomena exist in both virtual and physical spaces, as well as the way that, in some instances, religion bridges or erases this dichotomy. The approach here focuses on those forms of religious practice that do not fit easily into one or the other type of space. Starting with existing discussions of ethnographic methodologies for studying religious practice and the growing literature on how to study “digital religion”, we examine the methodological needs for studying “third spaces”, the hybrid, in-between spaces of religious practice. The model presented here is one of simultaneous and collaborative ethnography that extends shared methods across the virtual and the actual dimensions as the most productive approach to this type of research. Using tailored research methods and techniques within this approach offers the opportunity to consider ways in which behaviors, interactions, and speech acts that happen within this event are continuous or discontinuous with each other. It also offers insight into the dynamics of “shared experience” and how perspectives are or are not shared within these multiple dimensions.

Drawing on research in progress in the Partispace project we make a case for the recognition of the importance of non-formal spaces in response to young refugees across three different national contexts: Frankfurt in Germany; Gothenburg in Sweden; and Manchester in the UK. It is argued that recognition of local regulation and national controls of immigration which support climates of hostility makes it important to recognise and affirm the significance of non-formal spaces and ‘small spaces close to home’ which are often developed in the ‘third space’ of civil society and arise from the impulses driven by the solidarity of volunteers. In these contexts it is important that practices of hospitality can develop which symbolically reconstitute refugees as hosts and subjects of a democratic conversation, without which there is no possible administrative solution to the refugee crisis. It is essential that educational spaces such as schools, colleges and universities forge strong bonds with such emergent spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The journey of the Wycliffe Global Alliance (WGA) is an example of how some paradigm shifts are influencing leading in mission. Since Christianity is both an agent and product of globalization, its beliefs have spread from one source to another, crossing religious, linguistic and cultural contexts. As a result, there are polycentric or multiple centres of influence since Christianity has homes within a diversity of contexts. This carries with it various implications including how partnering in mission needs to be deconceptualized through greater emphasis on friendship. In order for this to happen as a missiological principle, third spaces may need to be created. Viewed against the backdrop of church and mission agency leadership, structures may be 'stuck in the Industrial Era' (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007: 298). Therefore, the stage is set for exploring how these and other themes influence leadership in God's mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider our experiences in a community bread-baking project, part of the international Bread Houses Network. We explore the performative and narrative power of food memories – as recounted and created during Bread House gatherings – to serve as sites where inter/cultural identities, differences, and dis/connections are made and negotiated. We propose the processes of food remembering and creation that we facilitate at the Bread House as a performative and critical pedagogy that “enables and encourages us to form solidarities, address current problematics, and build a better future in a more concrete sense” (Alexander, Bryant Keith, et al. “Identifying Key Intercultural Urgencies, Issues, and Challenges in Today’s World: Connecting Our Scholarship to Dynamic Contexts and Historical Moments. ”Journal of International and Intercultural Communication7.1 (2014): 38-67. Print). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written on the importance of writing retreats in providing the conditions for productive writing, away from the demands of everyday academic life. Most authors, however, acknowledge that even though retreats may result in positive outcomes, they are also complex social spaces which participants may experience as challenging. One, perhaps different, way to understand these difficulties is that they are the sorts of differences typical of a form of learning space known as a 'third space'. In such spaces, as seen through an Activity Theory lens, differences can be understood as drivers for collaborative learning and development. Theorising writing retreats as third spaces within an Activity Theory framework then opens up ways to potentially enhance participants' learning experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon four years of research within a social design experiment, we focus on how teacher learning can be supported in designed environments that are organized around robust views of learning, culture, and equity. We illustrate both the possibility and difficulty of helping teachers disrupt the default teaching scripts that privilege traditional forms of participation, support, and hierarchal relations, as well as disrupt static and reductive notions of culture. In doing so, we hope to make visible the complexities of leveraging cultural repertoires of practice within a designed learning environment in which novice teachers work to negotiate both common sense and normative conceptualizations of learning and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of the study was to examine university-school partnerships in the process of teacher education. The research question that guided the study was how teacher educators partner with schools in teacher training. A qualitative study was preferred because the aim was to gather information and opinions on how teacher educators trained student teachers as well as to provide a forum for pre-service student teachers to air their views about how they were trained. Twenty- six lecturers and nine student focus groups, purposively sampled, participated in the study. An interview was used for data collection and Holliday's thematic approach was used to analyse the data. The research revealed that there was a weak partnership between teacher education and schools. The study recommends the creation of third spaces in teacher education which involve an "equal and more dialectical relationship between academic and practitioner knowledge" in support of student teachers' learning.

The Late Iron Age of northern Finland is often approached through an ethnic perspective. Archaeological sites are defined as local or foreign and, accordingly, linked to either Sámi or non-Sámi groups. In recent decades, the concept of transculturalism and mixing of cultural traits has been discussed by several researchers, and their work has shown that such categorizations can be questioned. Correspondingly, certain sites and artifacts found in the northern parts of Finland seem to relate to interactions and contacts instead of ethnic backgrounds. One such site was excavated at Viinivaara E in 2013 and 2014. Based on the fieldwork, the site can be linked to encounters and cultural exchange between local groups and visitors. The entangled nature of the site is understood by taking into consideration its location and landscape, but also by examining the archaeological and historical conception of Late Iron Age northern Finland in general. Further, transcultural dynamics present at the site are also tied to social development on a broader temporal and spatial scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts to understand contemporary religious practice, and its associated communities and identities, must take into consideration the way that these phenomena exist in both virtual and physical spaces, as well as the way that, in some instances, religion bridges or erases this dichotomy. The approach here focuses on those forms of religious practice that do not fit easily into one or the other type of space. Starting with existing discussions of ethnographic methodologies for studying religious practice and the growing literature on how to study "digital religion", we examine the methodological needs for studying "third spaces", the hybrid, in-between spaces of religious practice. The model presented here is one of simultaneous and collaborative ethnography that extends shared methods across the virtual and the actual dimensions as the most productive approach to this type of research. Using tailored research methods and techniques within this approach offers the opportunity to consider ways in which behaviors, interactions, and speech acts that happen within this event are continuous or discontinuous with each other. It also offers insight into the dynamics of "shared experience" and how perspectives are or are not shared within these multiple dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where two or more persons from different professions meet to discuss a shared project, a dialogic 'third space' is opened up. Such dialogues (or multilogues) can be problematic for reasons which are well attested to in the literature. Third spaces can be sites of hostility and defensiveness, or of creativity and learning. This article explores the nature and management of the third space, noting that existing advice and guidance for evaluators -- while important -- is of necessity abstract. Interaction, on the other hand, is always embedded, shaped by unique contextual contingencies. Operating successfully in the third space therefore requires expertise which is difficult to codify. However, the authors argue that some sorts of dialogue (the Socratic, and audit) are generally inappropriate to the establishment of good relationships, that expertise in paying attention to contextual aspects of a situation is of the essence, and that learning how to improvise in an appropriate manner has to be learnt in order to bring about productive and ethically sound dialogue. The first part of the article presents a theoretical discussion of these issues; the second part analyses two episodes where the interaction had become unproductive. These are drawn from a recent responsive evaluation project conducted by the authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]