This essay argues for a paradigm shift in what counts as learning and literacy education for youth. Two related constructs are emphasized: collective Third Space and sociocritical literacy. The construct of a collective Third Space builds on an existing body of research and can be viewed as a particular kind of zone of proximal development. The perspective taken here challenges some current definitions of the zone of proximal development. A sociocritical literacy historicizes everyday and institutional literacy practices and texts and reframes them as powerful tools oriented toward critical social thought. The theoretical constructs described in this article derive from an empirical case study of the Migrant Student Leadership Institute (MSLI) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Within the learning ecology of the MSLI, a collective Third Space is interactional^ constituted, in which traditional conceptions of academic literacy and
instruction for students from nondominant communities are contested and replaced with forms of literacy that privilege and are contingent upon students' sociohistorical lives, both proximally and distally. Within the MSLI, hybrid language practices; the conscious use of social theory, play, and imagination; and historicizing literacy practices link the past, the present, and an imagined future.
This article describes a longitudinal ethnographic research project in a Grade 1 classroom enrolling L2 learners and Anglophones. Using a community-of-practice perspective rarely applied in L2 research, the author examines three classroom practices that she argues contribute to the construction of L2 learners as individuals and as such reinforce traditional second language acquisition perspectives. More importantly, they serve to differentiate participants from one another and contribute to community stratification. In a stratified community in which the terms of stratification become increasingly visible to all, some students become defined as deficient and are thus systematically excluded from just those practices in which they might otherwise appropriate identities and practices of growing competence and expertise.