An English geography curriculum abroad: Using ‘third space’ as an ideal type to understand similarity and difference

Abstract

Where there is a demand for English-medium schooling and English academic qualifications in a former British colony such as Sri Lanka, questions about power relations and the construction of knowledge are raised. Geography is a school subject that claims to make sense of the world. In this article I propose a postcolonial theoretical framework and the concept of third space as an ideal type to compare with interaction in the pedagogical third space of geography classrooms where the syllabus is from a colonial epistemology, teachers may be local or British expatriate and pupils are from affluent families desirous of an English education. This comparison will help further our understanding of how and what kind of geographical knowledge of difference and similarity is constructed through interaction between the syllabus, pupils and teachers in geography classrooms in British international schools.

Introduction

I propose that a postcolonial theoretical perspective (Andreotti, 2011) is a productive and helpful stance for researching the teaching and learning of geography in an international context because it embraces complexity and challenges taken-for-granted knowledge and tradition. A starting point for me is the way in which postcolonialism exposes the way in which culture and education are interconnected and co-dependent by asking questions about knowledge and the discursive traditions through which knowledge is produced (Tikly, 2004). Postcolonialism as a theoretical stance affords representation of the colonised, providing them with opportunities for voice and agency. Postcolonialism is a culturally ethical position for educational research (Bristol, 2012). In this article I develop an argument for a postcolonial view of education and propose using the concept of third space as an ideal type (Weber, 2011) to analyse the enactment of an English geography curriculum in British international schools in a former British colony.

Unlike other researchers (Quigley, 2013; Stevenson, 2015; Wiltse, 2015), I am not proposing action research to find a new or better way of teaching geography. Rather, I ask what can be learnt by comparing third space as an ideal type with the real world context where cultural and social interactions happen in the context of teaching and learning an English geography curriculum in British international schools in a former colony.

Schools in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is a former British colony that gained independence in 1948, and school education in Sri Lanka has a colonial heritage. European missionaries established schools to ‘reform’ the colonised people (Wickramasinghe, 2006). Around the time of independence, Sinhala and Tamil replaced English as the languages used to teach the Sri Lankan curriculum in state schools (Wickramasinghe, 2006) with English being introduced to older age groups (Little, 2003).

State school education has been free to citizens of Sri Lanka since independence and has been compulsory for children aged 5–14 years since 1988 (Tilakaratna, 2014). Education policies and initiatives such as free text books, uniforms, midday meals and the provision of transport to school ‘have made Sri Lanka’s education one of, if not the most, accessible in the developing world’ (Little, 2011: 502). However, not all Sri Lankan children attend school and this is symptomatic of social inequalities despite declarations of accessibility. Arunatilake’s 2006 study, based on data from the Sri Lanka Integrated Survey, showed that ethnic group, family income, age, gender and location affect school attendance for 5 to 14 year-olds. All ethnic groups had lower attendance rates than the Sinhalese, in particular Sri Lankan Tamils.

British international schools

International education is a broad term to define.

[a]t its simplest, international education extends the boundaries of knowledge about education beyond single nations and cultures and involves the practices of analysis, advocacy and cross border activity.

(Little, 2010: 846)

I define British international schools in Sri Lanka as being English-medium, being fee paying and offering English qualifications, such as the International General Certificate of Education (IGCSE). They are private enterprises and sit largely outside the national education system. I am interested in them as they constitute a space where different cultural practices mix, and I wish to investigate power relations and how knowledge is produced in this context. Therefore, British international schools in Sri Lanka are the real life context for the application of third space as an ideal type.

In Sri Lanka there is a desire for an English-medium education and internationally recognised English qualifications that enable access to higher education around the world and particularly in England (Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka, 2013). This creates demand and therefore a market. Bates (2011) contextualises the expansion of international schools within the globalisation of neo-liberal ideology and what this means for schools, local communities and culture.

Private schooling has been discussed as a global trend and identifies a ‘de-nationalisation’ of education where national governments no longer control their education systems (Ball, 2012: 4). Ball emphasises how the demand for private education supports inequalities in societies if only some families are able to afford certain types of schooling, leading to a stratified education system of schools and private tutoring. The 40 British international schools in Sri Lanka (International Schools Consultancy, 2013) do not come under the jurisdiction of the Sri Lanka Ministry of Education (at the time of writing) and are open to anyone who can pay the fees.

IGCSE is devised and administered by awarding organisations based in the UK. Evans and Little (2007) have considered the role of UK qualification suppliers in Sri Lanka including one that provides IGCSE and A levels. Sri Lanka’s education system sets its own nationally recognised qualifications, but Evans and Little note the demand for English qualifications due to the status attached to them. The awarding organisation researched by Evans and Little operates globally but has adjusted its Sri Lankan presence according to local conditions by retaining a recognisable UK brand, which it has not done elsewhere in the world or when marketing other kinds of qualifications even in Sri Lanka, and promoted its high levels of quality control. The demand for English qualifications in Sri Lanka has been attributed to elitist aspiration, increased affluence, a lack of cohesion within Sri Lankan economic and education policy, and national economic liberalisation creating a market for international qualifications (Evans and Little, 2007).

Research into attitudes towards the different forms of English (British, American, Indian, Sri Lankan) taught and used in Sri Lanka found that British English, which is the English used by the international curriculum and English-medium schools, is recognised and valued as social capital (Bernaisch, 2012). Regardless of socio-economic group, gender, age, place of residence or proficiency in English (of whichever kind), British English was rated highly for beauty, seriousness, formality, educatedness and prestige (Bernaisch, 2012: 288). More marginalised groups in Sri Lanka show reluctance to learn British English as they perceive that the opportunities that its use could offer are not open to them and Bernaisch concludes that the status of British English is ‘colonial baggage’ (Bernaisch, 2012: 289) and is a marker of the elite in Sri Lankan society, being valued as social capital by those able to access this kind of education and recognised by those who cannot afford such opportunities.

Postcolonial theory

Postcolonial theory provides a way of thinking about relations with the ‘Other’ in a way that allows dialogue between them and the colonisers without the historical cultural inequalities of colonialism. The implication of postcolonial theory for education is an epistemological position that questions the objectivity of knowledge, as postcolonial theory (along with other approaches) sees knowledge as being constructed though a relational process (Bhabha, 1994).

Said’s (1978) work is foundational to postcolonial theory. His view, being based on the ideas of Foucault that knowledge is linked to power and power relations, is that the West produced knowledge about the colonised world by seeing things through the lens of Western culture, and that this knowledge was then used to exert control over the colonised people (Said, 1978). Andreotti describes this as developing a political view of reality:

From this perspective, the study of the Orient is the study of Europe’s ‘Other’, an interested political vision of reality that produces a binary opposition between ‘them’ (the strange, the Orient, the East) and ‘us’ (the familiar, Europe, West). This binary becomes essential for European identity…

(Andreotti 2011: 21)

It is through these binaries that a dependency situation is created and also that the very identification of the ‘Other’ has implications for the construction of the ‘Self’ (Said, 1978). This process comes about by the production of knowledge of the ‘Other’ by the West. Although very important to the foundations of postcolonial theory, Said is not without critics. Criticism has been levelled on the grounds that Said is guilty of homogenising and essentialising the West, thus presenting a picture characterised by fixed relationships and discourses (Andreotti, 2011). As Said considers accounts of history from a Western perspective and claims a misrepresentation of the ‘Other’, the logical assumption is that there is an agreed representation that does not change.

The work of Homi Bhabha (1994), rooted in post-structuralism, further sharpens postcolonial theory as a tool for examining and analysing education as it critiques essentialism. Bhabha’s view is that the relationship between colonisers and the colonised is ambivalent and negotiable. His concept of ambivalence sees this intertwined relationship as based on a complex mix of attraction and repulsion so that neither can exist without the other.

Postcolonial theory is used as a lens to provide a structure and support for thinking. Andreotti has described the uses and limitations of theory:

[t]heory used as a tool-for-thinking rather than a description of truth: a specific lens will provide a focus for analysis that is consistent with its purpose – what it was made for. Therefore lenses will be limited by their scope, the aims and ability of whoever is handling it … No lens will offer a ‘true’ and complete picture of an entire landscape.

(Andreotti, 2011: 57–58)

Postcolonial theory is heterogeneous in nature. Andreotti has identified different strands that sit alongside each other, which have evolved in the way postcolonial theory is defined, contested and applied. One is ‘a discursive orientation that focuses on the instability of signification and the intimate relationship between the production of knowledge and power that is skeptical of grand narratives of progress and emancipation’ (Andreotti, 2011: 14), and the other centres around a critique of capitalism and social change. If a purpose of applying postcolonial theory to education is to ‘disrupt parochialisms and prompt significant shifts in thinking and practice in education’ (Andreotti, 2011: 1), then the strand that locates the subject in discourse and considers power relations within knowledge production as dynamic is appropriate to researching education.

In unravelling this discursive strand of postcolonial theory, Andreotti (2011) traces it to the seminal work of Said (1978) and also to Bhabha (1994) and Spivak (2010). It focuses on the relationships between colonisers and the colonised, the imperial processes that operate on the learner’s identity construction and the power relations associated with knowledge production. I see it as a hopeful stance to take as it offers a means of developing relationships and discourse about difference and otherness that is fluid, open and therefore avoids the binaries identified by Said (such as East/West) that lead to Othering, which ‘limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions and societies’ (Said, 1978: 46).

Some education research has concluded that educational discourse is essentialist in the construction and understanding of difference (Lambert and Morgan, 2010; Smith, 1999, 2004). In constructing the ‘Third World’ in the English National Curriculum, Smith’s ethnographic research in English schools suggested ‘that reality was characterised by a dichotomy of “developed” versus “developing countries” which essentialises the “Third World” as a series of absences’ (Smith, 1999: 492) and describes essentialism as a ‘sanitizing process – whereby more critical perspectives are continually deferred or subsumed within the language of efficiency’ (Smith, 2004: 747). McNess et al. (2015) describe the predisposition to accept binaries and dualisms as one which restricts our understandings of difference and limits appreciation of complexity and similarity. For instance, in geography education this has been found to manifest itself as a categorisation that results in a developed/developing world binary relationship and ways of describing other people and places in terms of absence or deficit (Andreotti, 2011; Spivak, 2010). Smith refers to this as de-contextualising difference (Smith, 1999), which is reductive; teaching about other countries became based on essentialist ‘facts’ because ‘imperial ideology … offered a stable frame through which to view and teach about the “other”’ (Smith, 2004: 746). Hong and Halvorsen (2010) researched how Asia is presented in the American secondary school curriculum and suggest that the school curriculum (and the school culture as a whole) is dominated by a discourse of binaries. Lambert and Morgan (2010) make the point that generalisations are prevalent and preferred so that the complexity of the social world is lost; social and historical contexts are lacking in geography education in schools in the United Kingdom.

Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence explains how a discourse of binaries produces generalisations through fixing and reducing difference to a stereotype. The relationships that are constructed through ambivalence may lead to mimicry on the part of the colonised, where they adopt certain beliefs and customs belonging to the colonisers. Whilst the colonisers desire the colonised to be like them, so that they become knowable, they do not want them to be the same as this would avoid cultural supremacy. Mimicry on the part of the colonised poses a threat to the colonisers as it can come close to challenging their powerful position over the colonised. Fixity is a feature of colonial discourse that cements differences so that the colonised can be considered static and knowable, thus reducing their challenge to the power of the colonisers, and giving rise to stereotypes. Bhabha (1994) describes stereotyping as a discursive strategy; it is the process of ambivalence that gives stereotypes value and authority, which ‘construct relationships based on and governed by discrimination’ (Andreotti, 2011: 27) through colonial discourses.

Andreotti (2011) emphasises how important Bhabha’s (1994) conceptualisation of culture as fluid, relational and heterogeneous is to education. Bhabha’s view is that colonised people necessarily have a different relation to culture because they have less power, including over knowledge construction. Therefore culture cannot be considered as one homogenous object, but rather as a varied, dynamic and hybrid set of practices constructed for social survival (Bhabha, 1994). Different groups construct different meanings based on their interests, and these meanings will change so that knowledge will be situated and contextualised. No meaning or cultural practice can exist without being interpreted by other systems of representation or cultural practices, and this is important in understanding how different groups are represented in education (Andreotti, 2011: 30). For example, it is not the existence of tradition that brings about a position of privilege but the recognition and resultant power of the invention of tradition.

Bhabha describes a ‘third space of enunciation’ (Bhabha, 1994: 54) where the discourse avoids fixity, allowing a challenge to the cultural supremacy of the colonised. For education, this represents a postcolonial strategy that affords the colonised opportunity to exercise agency over their signification in the eyes of the colonised (and vice versa) and when knowledge is being constructed. This is different from Said’s (1978) contribution, which starts from the point that knowledge has been constructed and the effort is to dislodge misrepresentation already in existence. Identities constructed in this third space, as described by Bhabha, could bring about social and cultural change based on hybridity and difference. If the way knowledge is constructed is changed by affording agency to the colonised, then power relations between the colonised and colonisers will also change (Said, 1978), making time an important factor.

Bhabha (1994) sees cultural diversity as an essentialist object and cultural difference as a process grounded in ambivalence and hybridity where cultures exist in relation to one another. I suggest that hybridity as a theoretical construct is able to challenge essentialist binaries that feature in the discourse and practice of geography education. In the discourse and enactment of English geography curricula there is evidence of essentialist diversity (Lambert and Morgan, 2010; Smith, 1999, 2004). A reductive description of a place or people would be typical of cultural diversity and a result of fixity (through educational discourse in this case), making the colonised knowable and less threatening. Cultural diversity considers that cultures exist alongside each other but separately, whereas cultural difference is a relational state where all cultures are hybrid, exist in relation to one another with no claim to authenticity. The conditions of cultural difference afford potential or change over time.

Spivak (2010), like Said (1978) and Bhabha (1994), draws on post-structuralism and articulates the possibility of a postcolonial education by identifying the need to create a more ethical engagement with the Other. By promoting the idea of multiple voices being heard and concentrating on the position of the subaltern, which she defines as lack of access to cultural imperialism brought about by discursive processes, Spivak suggests the need to deconstruct and critique educational discourse (Andreotti, 2011). She recommends educators to take a hyper-reflexive position where they constantly acknowledge and question their complicity in constructing unequal power relations. Spivak sees the unlearning of privilege, or re-education (Mishra Tarc, 2009), as a way to challenge the dominance of colonial power and allow the colonisers to learn from the colonised Other. By recognising racism and learning from the results of inequalities educators can work towards this goal and change the view of the world so that difference is not denied.

Geographical knowledge, colonialism and postcolonialism

Geography as a subject discipline has been shaped by British colonialism (Jazeel, 2012a, 2012b; Madge et al., 2009; Sharp, 2009). Geography literature has addressed a pertinent question about the link between colonial power relations and geography, or to put it another way, the colonial heritage of geography as a subject discipline. The Royal Geographical Society was founded in 1830 and was linked to the British Empire by its accumulation of knowledge about the territories (Sharp, 2009). By creating categories (and binaries), the world was made easier to know and understand from an ethnocentric, Western viewpoint.

Formal colonialism generated an added incentive to learn about what had been conquered, whether in order to manage the natives and learn about their ways so as to control them … or to find out about the resources available that would boost the wealth of a colonising power. Geographers had an important role in this. Indeed, the formation of the modern discipline was dependent upon geographers’ roles in the charting of new places and acted as an aid to stagecraft in expansion overseas.

(Sharp, 2009: 30)

Said (1978) considered the discourse of texts, which contain East/West binaries and represent ideals. Sharp (2009) states that geography (as a subject) looks at the consequences of putting texts into practice. This is the case when considering geography as a subject discipline that is researched, created and studied in universities being placed in the school curriculum in the form of policy documents like the English National Curriculum and examination syllabuses. Geographical knowledge that features in the school curriculum helps make sense of the world and provides ways of knowing about places and people that have not been experienced first-hand (Lambert and Morgan, 2010; Sharp, 2009; Walford, 2001). The term ‘imagined geographies’ is used to describe knowledge of other people and places, and our place in the world. This knowledge precedes experience and gives rise to predetermined categories into which empirical evidence is made to fit, so that ‘the imaginative geography of Orientalism shaped the real geographies practised in the space of the Orient’ (Sharp, 2009: 17). Indeed ‘this imaginative geography was made manifest over space as it was built into colonial policy, into the institutions of governance, and more recently, into the practices of aid and development’ (Sharp, 2009: 17).

The postcolonial view challenges the conventional, taken-for-granted geography of the classroom and the impact of Orientalism with its binaries, homogenising effect and consequent Othering on framing geographical imaginations (Jazeel, 2012a). The nature of this challenge is to question the self-confidence and binaries that are given as representations of the Other in favour of a process of unlearning along the lines of Spivak’s (2010) recommendations: ‘I wish to continue advocating the importance of postcolonialism in the classroom as a kind of critical and inquisitive undoing of received geographical knowledges, a geographical unlearning of sorts’ (Jazeel, 2012b: 60). Unlearning or re-education is advocated by Andreotti based on the implications of Spivak’s (2010) ideas for education (Andreotti, 2011), whereby unlearning enables conditions and possibilities for knowledge that are otherwise stifled by fixed ideas and stereotypes.

In developing the postcolonial critique of geography as a discipline, Jazeel (2014) describes geography as Eurocentric and ideologically limited as it is restricted by the binaries, universalisms and ‘taken-as-given concept-metaphors’ (Jazeel, 2014: 88) and develops the concept of subaltern geographies as a way of addressing this deficiency. Jazeel uses the term subaltern geographies:

[t]o refer to ways of thinking spatially that may be considered lower . The subaltern spatialities in Sri Lanka that I engage are in fact complicit with power, with the state’s ethicizing Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony that is to say, but what interests me here is their subalternity in the context of disciplinary geography’s inability to grasp those spatialities through the lens of extant concept-metaphors.

(Jazeel, 2014: 95–96)

Jazeel’s point is that the subject discipline of geography uses well-established, Eurocentric concepts that are accepted as universal to shape and frame research from which taken-for-granted geographical knowledge is produced. This knowledge underpins the school curriculum and resources designed to support its teaching and learning. Jazeel illustrates his ideas by explaining how the Eurocentric concept-metaphors of nature and religion are misleading and deficient in analysing human relationships with the environment in Sri Lanka. He suggests that through unlearning this Eurocentric conceptual framework we may ‘identify how dominant concept-metaphors … always work to pull us into forms of implicit and silent comparison’ (Jazeel, 2014: 98). The question of the role of religion assumes the existence of the secular – a binary – that does not exist in Sri Lankan culture. Buddhism is a way of life that is subsumed in political as well social practice (Jazeel, 2014).

The nature of geography as a subject is different in universities and schools. In universities, knowledge is created; in schools, knowledge is communicated (Lambert, 2014). School geography content and examinations used to be set and controlled by academic geographers in universities in the United Kingdom, whereas in the last 25 years or so school geography has been dominated by pedagogues thus removing the direct link between geographical knowledge production and school geography practice (Lambert, 2014: 164–165). Given this change of emphasis towards pedagogy, a logical conclusion is that teachers are less concerned with subject disciplinary knowledge and its critique, which in turn contributes to the objectification of the knowledge in the geography curriculum in schools.

In discussing types of knowledge in the school curriculum, Young (2014) describes a distinction between everyday knowledge, and systematic and specialised knowledge that enables prediction, explanation and the identification of alternatives. However, in their discussion of primary school children’s geographies, Catling and Martin (2011) suggest that this distinction creates a binary relationship, with the result that everyday knowledge is subjected to Othering by this paternalistic, powerful knowledge that is separated from the knower. The implication of this is that an ethnocentric Western curriculum should not be privileged over the knowledges of the colonised, but rather these knowledges interact and contribute to different understandings of the world.

Third space as an ideal type

I propose third space as an ideal type to apply to the real life context of teaching an English geography curriculum abroad. I will outline what I understand by the abstract concept third space and discuss how it has been employed as a theoretical concept in education research. An ideal type, after Weber (2011), is a tool for analysis that is used in the exploration and analysis of culture and values in an education context (Hayhoe, 2007). The construction of an ideal type is normative and does not imply a value judgement (Ritzer, 2005). An ideal type is not an average, rather it is an ideal or Utopian form not found in reality (Weber, 2011). Its use allows the researcher to specify aspects of a situation to compare with a real world experience to identify similarities and differences and raise further questions.

I suggest that third space is an ideal type that presents conditions where the ‘ethnographic dazzle’ described by McNess et al. (2015) may be challenged. The concept represents in theory a space where individuals and groups negotiate with each other so that complexity is afforded and similarities as well as differences are recognised. This discussion leads me to suggest third space as an ideal type to compare with how and what knowledge is constructed where the curriculum, pupils and teachers are from different cultures.

Hayhoe (2007) describes ‘multi-faceted ways in which both normative and institutional ideal types could be used for the identification and analysis of educational problems within and across different societies’ (Hayhoe, 2007: 190). Hayhoe used ideal types to develop a culturally based understanding of education, and her aim was for a mutuality of understanding of education between different cultures that moved beyond ways of organising education. Hayhoe does not, however, specifically consider power relations and assumes a mutual dialogue between cultures.

Whilst Hayhoe (2007) employed ideal types to predict future developments in the education system of China and draw comparisons between China and Canada, Gray et al. (2014) generated ideal types of student behaviour from empirical evidence in order to evaluate student engagement in higher education. As these two examples illustrate, ideal types as an analytical tool have a place in education research as a heuristic.

I have traced third space as a theoretical concept to Bhabha (1994). The characteristics that feature in the ideal type of third space include being a socially constructed, hybrid cultural space within which discourses and epistemologies can be articulated and deliberated through dialogue. It is a hybrid, intercultural context where cultures interact; an in-between space that may be challenging, disquieting and risky. A vital feature of third space is negotiation between cultures as it is where identities are challenged, changed and formed through the possibility of contesting the dominant discourse. Here then, in third space as a theoretical concept and ideal type, new knowledge and meaning are created through interaction and negotiation between cultural and professional identities and these also offer the potential for social and cultural change.

Third space has been used with different emphases in education research. Moje et al. (2004) outline three views of third space in education research: as a bridge or means of crossing between cultures; as a way of supporting pupils in navigating educational discourse and gaining multiple funds of knowledge in order that they make progress towards conventional academic goals; ‘a space of cultural, social, and epistemological change in which the competing knowledges and discourses of different spaces are brought into “conversation” to challenge and reshape … practices and the knowledges’ (Moje et al., 2004: 44). This description of third space fails to acknowledge that everyday knowledge may be Othered by the specialised knowledge as set out in the geography curriculum (Catling and Martin, 2011) and therefore the authority held by the subject curriculum knowledge. By assuming that crossing between cultures is facilitated within third space, Moje et al. (2004) do not consider differential power relations that exist in the school and the classroom, for instance between teachers and pupils, despite mentioning the desire to attain conventional academic goals.

Third space was used as a conceptual tool as the context for interaction between the researcher and participants in an action research project on indigenous teachers’ cultural role in the classroom in Canada by Stevenson (2015). Teachers watched video recordings of their lessons in order to recall and reflect on their roles, and Stevenson noted that ‘research work focusing on the experiences of Indigenous teachers … points to a cultural conflict between those teachers’ own Indigenous cultures and the epistemological foundations of the colonial forms that still exist in the formal schooling in their communities’ (Stevenson, 2015: 290). Stevenson does consider power relations as a restriction on establishing ‘effective third spaces’ (Stevenson, 2015: 300). I question Stevenson’s premise of establishing such a space because power relations in the classroom are unequal. Practical and logistical power in terms of making decisions about what happens in the classroom may be in the hands of the teacher or may be shared between teachers, senior staff and sometimes pupils. Epistemological power over the knowledge in the classroom third space is an important aspect to investigate and compare. The assertion made by Lambert (2014) that teachers have power and control over how the curriculum is taught is augmented by Stevenson’s research in acknowledging the cultural background and traditions of the teachers and the pupils.

Quigley (2013) uses the theoretical concept of congruent third space as a theoretical framework. She defines congruent third space as ‘pedagogical practices that combine the worlds of students (first space) with the worlds of school science (second space) to construct a congruent Third space’ (Quigley, 2013: 840). Her assumption is that congruence is attempted through equality in negotiation between the discourses within the third space, thus creating knowledge through interaction between these discourses. My question here is similar to the one I ask of Stevenson and Lambert: whether equality between the classroom discourses can be the case? Quigley describes the discourses of the classroom as being instructional/pedagogical, scientific and everyday (embodied by the volunteer helpers from the community in the kindergarten classrooms she was researching). Whilst Quigley recognises third space and congruence through negotiation as theoretical constructs, she does not conceive of them as ideal types against which to compare her empirical research.

Wiltse (2015) uses third space as a theoretical concept to explore how pupils’ home cultures were used to shape literacy practices in primary schools in aboriginal communities in Canada. She works from a socio-cultural perspective of teaching and learning, situating learners and teachers in the context of their practice. Wiltse acknowledges the multiple nature of identity and uses Bhabha’s (1994) ideas of hybridity in third space as a way of theorising how different identities may be constructed. She cites Moje et al. (2004) in defining first space as the pupils’ home and community, second space as the formalised discourse of schools and third space as hybrid because this is where first and second spaces mix. This categorisation appears to me to emphasise difference and avoid the complexity inherent in the concept of hybridity. The labels first space and second space are arbitrary; what marks out third space as an ideal type is its hybrid quality and its theoretical potential to overcome any first/second space binary (Moje et al., 2004: 42). Wiltse (2015: 61) concurs with Moje et al.’s (2004) conception of third space in education as a bridge between first and second space, a means of crossing between discourses in first and second space, and as a space where new knowledge is formed with the potential to bring about social and cultural change. Although this acknowledges the dynamic process of knowledge construction, it fails to address power relations in the third space of the classroom.

Research by Moje et al. (2004) has influenced educational perspectives on third space as a theoretical concept (Quigley, 2013; Wiltse, 2015). For Moje et al. (2004) and other researchers (Quigley, 2013; Wiltse, 2015), third space is the space where first and second spaces merge in a space of negotiation and interaction. This is an idealised, Utopian view of classroom interaction and education. By comparing third space as an ideal type with the interaction of different cultures and dialogue in the classroom, I aim to contribute to understanding what geography knowledge is produced and how.

Concluding remarks

The suggestion that teachers and educators do not necessarily know about the worlds pupils inhabit outside the school, may compound the unequal power relations between different kinds of knowledge (Catling and Martin, 2011) and authority in knowledge construction in the classroom between teachers and pupils (Wiltse, 2015). I assume that teachers perform a cultural role in the sense described by Stevenson (2015) and ask how geography teachers choose the materials and pedagogical methods they use. I recognise that teachers’ cultural practices are influenced by social and cultural practices that they negotiate in their academic and professional experiences (Bristol, 2012: 28).

Third space presents a move away from effect and prescription to an attention to process and outcome of negotiation. The setting I describe is complex, with the curriculum originating in a Western-centric tradition, teachers from different cultures, pupils from an elite group within a heterogeneous population and the pull of the Sri Lankan diaspora through the proxy of higher education opportunities. Third space as an ideal type has characteristics to overcome binaries, such as developed/less developed countries, and provides a space where power relations are subverted and dominant discourses are challenged through negotiation (Bhabha, 1994). Yet, is this the case and if not, why not? By applying third space as an ideal type to the real world classroom situation I have described, I hope to investigate these lines of enquiry and critique international schooling.

An ideal type is not the same as real world experience, neither is it a prescription of perfection. ‘Ideal types are made to be broken … and what does not fit the type may be more interesting than what does fit’ (Hayhoe, 2007: 196).

By comparing the real world experience of teaching and learning geography in a classroom where teachers, pupils and the curriculum are from different cultural backgrounds with the ideal type third space, we will learn more about power relations and knowledge in that context.