Third Space: When Learning Matters

The American education system is at a crossroads, and a new movement is emerging where parents are demanding a different kind of school for their children. Third Space: When Learning Matters, a new book based on a recent Arts Education Partnership (AEP) study, urges policy makers and educators to look to the arts as a powerful way to create vibrant learning communities that improve student achievement in all schools, particularly those struggling to improve academic performance.

Third Space is especially relevant to VSA arts and the people that we reach. In the ten schools that were the focus of the AEP study, special education students, on average, made up of over 20 percent of the student population. In at least two of the schools, special education students comprised over 25 percent of the student body. These numbers underscore the significance of the findings for students with disabilities, their families, and the education systems that serve them.

It is in this metaphorical “third space” created by the arts that students with disabilities, in particular, can more easily access inclusive learning environments and benefit from them.

It’s important that the Third Space message reaches parents and others who decide the future of our schools.

To learn more about Third Space: When Learning Matters including news articles and other information, as well as how to order a copy of the book, please visit the website Arts Education Partnership.

More Information About Third Space

Third Space: When Learning Matters is based on three years of research conducted by the Arts Education Partnership in ten high poverty rural and urban schools across the country. The schools have made the arts central to their curriculum, with powerful impacts on students, teachers and the entire school community. The book explores why the arts have such positive effects, adopting “third space” as a metaphor to capture the new contexts and conditions the arts create in the schools and the new possibilities for teaching, learning and community building these environments foster.

The research suggests that educational reform can emerge from the bottom up, when the student becomes the epicenter of school transformation. The arts create the optimal conditions to engage students actively in learning that matters to them – a quality identified by researchers from cognitive science, student engagement, and youth development as the key to deep understanding and self-directed learning. As forms of uniquely personal and original expressions that link the lives of students outside of school with classroom performance, the arts become revelations to teachers of capacities they can tap in individual students. The new collaborative teacher-student relationships create a dynamic that can transform the entire school.

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