Affordance as a Key Aspect in the Creation of New learning Spaces

This research aims to highlight how different places and spaces in undergraduate teacher education afford student learning and the development of certain types of knowledge related. The questions this article addresses are:
a) What is the affordance of different learning spaces in an undergraduate blended learning (BL) education?
b) What are the actors’ prerequisites and reported understanding of the driving forces behind their learning activities in these different spaces?
The analysis draws on a conceptual frame of complex affordance of spaces in a socio-cultural perspective, but also on spaces for both social and individual knowledge development. Through the analysis of empirical data gained from a pragmatic mixed-method approach, the role of different face-to-face and online spaces is investigated; investigations are based on the understandings of students, lecturers, and practitioners. The major findings regard the contribution of spaces to sociality, identity, and referential embodied experiences, which greatly influence student preferences and learning activity, as well as knowledge development. It is concluded that individually and socially constructed learning influence and are influenced by different learning spaces. A student’s identity is a prerequisite to their interaction with spaces, but the borders, artefacts, and possibilities of the spaces also contribute to the student’s development of identity. Development of identity cannot be separated from learning and student interaction in learning spaces. A student’s embodied interaction is found both in reference to experience and in the process of being developed towards a fictive future, which is a result of their preferences and engagement.