Governments and universities across Europe have introduced several initiatives aiming to strengthen collaboration between researchers and practitioners as well as between different actors within different fields in education (Prøitz & Rye 2023, OECD 2022). We can observe variations of such initiatives, for example, in partnership agreements between universities and schools, and local authorities, in funding schemes that require collaboration between researchers and practitioners, and in the growth in professional doctoral programmes, in which applicants must have teacher education experience and preferably work in teacher education or in schools while doing their doctoral work (Prøitz & Wittek, 2019). In relation to such inititiatives the concept of third space is often used to describe, define, analyse and explain what these efforts entail.  

This paper presents a systematic review study of how the concepts of “third space” is understood and used in education research. The background for the paper is grounded in a general observation of a sudden growth in the usage of the concept in education research. The literature "third space" is often characterized as a place or a space where integration of knowledge and discourses from different rooms meet and merge, for example when people's knowledge and discourses from home, local environment or network characterized as “first space”, meets and merges with knowledge and discourses within a formalized institution such as school or work “second space” integrates and form a common new knowledge base and discourse through collaboration and partnership in “third space”. (Moje et al.  2004).  

The concept has been used in research as a suggestion, a hybrid solution addressing for example challenges related to the involvement of different groups of actors in research practice partnership, (Passy et al. 2018). The term "third space" originates in research that considers that different actors use different discourses from different contexts, research as well as own experiences, to understand the world (Lynch 2015). Hybrid thinking emphasizes that positions between areas of knowledge and different discourses can be productive, but also limiting to human activities and practices.  

An interesting element in this thinking is that "third space" also can mean a reconstruction that defines a new, alternative situation and problem understanding based on mutual respect for the positions, experiences, knowledge and discourses of others (Moje 2004). It is important to emphasize that third room thinking does not mean that everyone should be converted to researchers, but that it involves establishing a common / common language that frames discourses where the actors with their genuine competence are given an equal role in the collaboration. It is only when the actors' discourses and knowledge can meet in a common discourse with a common one language that a third room will be able to safeguard the premise of equality. 

Third-room thinking can be understood in at least three ways: As a way to build bridges between marginalized and academic discourses, as a way to navigate different environments with discourses and as a space where different and possibly competing ideas are brought together to challenge dominant discourses (Moje et al 2004). All three perspectives can help build down unwanted hierarchical structures and competing discourses between, for example, schools on the one hand and on the other hand higher education and research (Passy et al. 2018). 

These contributions discussing understandings of the concept in question is however first and foremost theories and ideas about the concept, in this study we aim to map and systematize how third space as a concept is used in education research to provide an overview of potential patterns of understandings and what implication this might have for the further usage of the concept in the field of education. 

This systematic literature review draws on well-known procedures defined in the literature on research synthesis. The current study shares similarities with a systematic mapping in which different elements derived from individual studies are identified and configured into a new, macro-conceptual and/or theoretical understanding (Gough et al., 2012). As the aim of this study is to explore a concept used in diverse literature, this review can also be viewed as sharing methodological ideas with the meta-narratives developed by Greenhalgh et al. (2005). Literature searches was conducted in Academic Search Premier, Business Source Elite. ERIC, Web of Science, Scopus, Oria, Norart, Idunn, Libris, Swepub and bibliotek.dk. The search term “third space” were truncated and searched as the key phrase. Years for inclusion were set to the period 2000-2021, and the languages to be included were set to English and Scandinavian languages. Publication types were limited to peer review articles, books and book chapters. Searches identified a total of 2280 hits and after two rounds of screening and exclusion and inclusion 521 full publications were included in the study. Screening and coding involved three steps of procedure. The first step involved screening publication titles and abstracts to identify publications of relevance to the study. In a second step, the publications were coded and categorized. The coding scheme developed for this study was inspired by the work of Wilson (2014) and previous work on systematizing and analysing research in education (Prøitz et al. 2017). The coding of the identified studies used several descriptive variables such as: year of publication, first author’s country of origin, language, school level focus, actor focus, research question and aim of the study, type of study, method of study and results of the study. This provided the study with descriptive information that could be quantified and combined for an overview of the main characteristics of the included studies. In the third step, paragraphs defining and describing the study’s research questions and/or aims, data and selection and results were identified and extracted to facilitate the qualitative identification and interpretation of patterns. The interpretive approach used in this step of the review was inspired by Noblit and Hare’s (1988) work on lines-of-argument synthesis, and (Lillejord & Børte, 2016). The extracts were configured through comparison of patterns of similarities and differences and clustering of meaning within and between categories.

Preliminary findings of the study displays how the concept of third space often is used metaphorically as a room where knowledge, people, professionals and sectors can meet as equals for productive development of new ways of collaboration, understandings or innovation. The study also shows how the concept is used across a great variety of levels, and fields indicating a universality in understandings even in rather contrasting and conflicting fileds that potentially can mask existing challenges in third space collaborative work.

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