One Space, Many Roles: Flexible Clinical Learning Spaces as an Affordance for Transformative Learning.

Abstract

Clinical education has always unfolded within particular spaces: the bedside, the outpatient clinic, the simulation lab. Growing student numbers, shorter hospital stays, new educational technologies, and the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic have exposed the limits of a single, fixed learning space. This is a perspective paper that synthesizes evidence from clinical education space design, competency-based medical education, workplace learning theory, and health professions technology, rather than reporting findings from primary data collection. This perspective argues that clinical learning spaces should be understood not as static containers but as flexible environments capable of taking on multiple physical, functional, temporal, interactional, and technological forms. Using five metaphors- space as a puzzle, a chameleon, a stage, a network, and a platform- this paper proposes a working framework for medical educators and argues that this variety creates conditions favorable to, though not sufficient alone for, transformative learning, which additionally requires deliberate reflective scaffolding rather than exposure to flexibility by itself. As a conceptual contribution, this framework is intended to inform institutional discussion and guide future empirical evaluation.