Forming and Sustaining a Learning Community and Developing Implicit Collective Goals in an Open Future Learning Space

This study investigates the role of space, material, and affect in undergraduate and graduate students’ lived experiences within an open Future Learning Space. Future Learning Spaces (FLSs) blend the latest in architectural advances for space design (e.g., modern, flexible furniture within collaborative environments that provide bring‐your‐own‐device [BYOD] connectivity) and advances in perspectives on learning and instruction (e.g., situated learning, distributed cognition, learning communities, knowledge building, collective inquiry; Hod, 2017). Findings suggest that the FLS was able to: (1) bring together individuals by producing individual and shared affective responses; (2) hold community together and inform perceptions; as well as (3) move the community together and shape practices. This study indicates that open FLSs are complex systems constructed by users, and users of open FLSs can meet some of the criteria for a learning community (LC), especially if we broaden the definitions to take into account implicit versions of an LC.