Recently a friend pointed out to me that she had come across the term “Third Space” in an article on LITERACY by Elizabeth Moje. The concept is discussed in some detail, but to distil some of the main points, Moje talks about first space which includes the understandings and language from a student’s everyday life; and second space which includes classroom and academic language. Third Space becomes a hybrid of these or a bridge between the two. It can be a “navigational” space to provide ways of succeeding in different discourse communities. It can also be a space of change where competing knowledges are brought together in “conversation” to challenge and reshape both the academic content and the everyday content of students’ lives. A Third Space helps learners to see connections as well as contradictions between the way they know the world and the way others know the world. Thus it can become a place of reflection, change and growth as well as learning.
(Elizabeth Moje is associate professor of educational studies at the University of Michigan.)
Third Space 
That’s interesting. Kind of like a third dimension. We need three dimensions to have perspective. In that sense the third third space is room to see things “in perspective”.
However we do occupy many different ‘spaces’, you might call them compartments, contexts or worlds in our lives. Often we exercise different behavioural sets, and values even, in each. For instance, it’s not unusual for people to behave quite differently at work to how they behave at home and different again at church, or at the sports club. Different again when driving their car or walking along a busy city footpath.
If we picture these different contexts as on a map, then maybe the third space is room to step back from the map like in a space station, and get those different contexts that we inhabit into perspective. Sometimes this is called “floating above it all” or a helicopter view.