This article examines play as a conceptual third space that serves as a bridge between home and school discourses. Using sociocultural theories and an interpretivist framework, 19 immigrant mothers and their children in Canada were interviewed about their play experiences at home and in preschools. The findings reveal that children and teachers utilise play as third space in various ways. Although there is some cultural dissonance experienced by children, this study illustrates ways that children use play as a bridge between home and school and explores strategies that teachers use in supporting children’s use of play as third space. As children navigate these two cultural sites, they accumulate funds of knowledge and life experiences, which then meet, interact and perhaps fuse together in the conceptual third space. The conclusion proposes that ‘play as third space’ can be used as a conceptual framework for educators and practitioners to support children’s transition from home to school and assist children who experience discontinuities.

Pre-service teachers are typically concerned with student assessment and view related issues through varied experiences and backgrounds. Understanding how they think about assessment issues within the current educational context helps to better prepare them. In this paper we describe pre-service teachers' thinking about assessment issues, the theories that underlie their thinking, and how it evolves as a result of using an introspective critical approach called the objective knowledge growth framework. The framework combines the diary and the think aloud protocol and brings pre-service teachers to identify initial assessment problems, propose tentative solutions, and challenge their solutions. Thirty-one pre-service teachers took part in this study and received a one hour workshop on the use of the introspective approach to solve their self-identified assessment issues. Brookhart's 'Tensions in Classroom Assessment Theory and Practice' framework was then used to explore the theories at play when pre-service teachers go through their problem solving processes. The participants identified group work, test failure, accommodation, fairness, multiple assessment opportunities, and academic enablers as key areas of concern. Particularly notable in the study, was the greater importance attached by the pre-service teachers to assessment for classroom management, student motivation, and social justice purposes, than to support learning. The analysis of these concerns using Brookhart's framework and of the reasoning about them suggests that the intersection of measurement, psychological, and social theories continues to impact the decision making process regarding assessment.

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