Drawing Taylor Swift, Orcas are Dolphins, & “What if” Questions

In preservice teacher education, there is often a tension between the realities of in-field experience and the theoretical knowledge of higher academia. This article reveals the benefits of an elementary mathematics education mentor-supervised clinical experience and the creation of a third space to bridge these tensions to cohesively traverse between practice to theory. Moreover, we provide this third space by sharing reflections on the challenges faced in our own in-field experience in hopes that others gain insight on a different mathematics field experience, how to support that transition from practice back to theory, and how to pivot when things do not go as planned.