Abstract
This study was designed to investigate an elementary school teacher’s reactions to realize “thirdspace”, where children study acquire academic knowledge in relation to their daily experiences. “Thirdspace” is caused from the action in children’s “underlife”, such as children’s chats in a class. Data werecollected from interactions of a teacher and children in a sixth grader class and from children’s chats inthe class. The following results emerged from the analysis. The teacher realized “third space” by (1)asking children the contents of children’s chats, not stopping children from chatting immediately, (2)interpreting the contents of children’s chats and introducing relations between the contents of children’schats and academic knowledge, and (3) asking questions about the contents of children’s chats many times.Moreover, it was found that these three points were needed for the teacher to realize “third space”. It wassuggested that a teacher needs to play a role which is different from the teacher maintaining teacher’sscript for realizing third space in a class.
