Introduction
This entry provides an overview of the concept of affordances as it pertains to innovation in educational settings. The term affordance was coined by James J. Gibson in 1979. He proposed that an affordance in the built environment was “what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (p. 127). In contemporary educational settings, affordances can be considered as the resources, objects, and components of the built environment that influence behavior within this setting. Since affordance theory has emerged, it has been co-opted by innovative learning environments theorists for explaining the opportunities that these spaces provide for the learning community; however, this is often a simplistic view of affordance theory and how it works in the educational setting. Therefore, the goal of this entry is to present the range of theoretical perspectives of affordance theory while analyzing them in relationship to the learning environment. When...
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Lippman, P.C., Matthews, E. (2020). Affordance Theory in Relationship to the Learning Environment. In: Peters, M., Heraud, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Innovation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2262-4_190-1
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