Bridging Space on Campus

"Students’ overall campus experience is linked to their sense of belonging, which in turn impacts their academic achievement, well-being, and mental health. For example, a sense of belonging is an important mediator that can attenuate pressure on many aspects, such as financial worries, and can also promote student academic performance and retention. Practical and positive interactions and relationships that establish a sense of belonging can make students feel cared for and noticed. This is excellent mental support, which can also effectively improve other aspects, such as attendance. In addition, a sense of belonging can effectively enhance students’ help-seeking behaviours, thereby improving students’ living and learning experiences on campus. A sense of belonging is also helpful to increase students’ sense of safety. There are various frameworks for understanding the concept of belonging within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). One approach identifies four relatively distinct domains that influence students’ sense of belonging: academic engagement, social interaction, physical environment, and personal space. Additionally, factors such as social capital, ethnic group compatibility and cohesion, experiences of social exclusion, and the nature of connections with faculty and campus—both on and off-site—are closely interrelated and significantly contribute to students’ overall sense of inclusion. Understanding the complexity of their relationships is central to influencing feelings of belonging. Identity is also crucial to a sense of belonging in a university setting. Students can gain a sense of belonging through expressing themselves authentically or inauthentically, depending on the context; hence, specific identities become more prominent than others. Spatial belonging is multidimensional and complex, which is another perspective to understand students’ sense of belonging in HEIs. Four spatial dimensions can be used to explain belonging on campus: physical, digital, relational, and structural. Among them, the physical dimension is considered to be the most fundamental dimension. For example, campus design helps promote a sense of familiarity, which is conducive to building students’ sense of belonging. The physical elements in the campus space, such as building materials, decorations, and furniture, become channels for expressing intangibility such as emotions, when they entangle with students’ activities. In reality, some of the physical space design cannot meet students' diverse needs, and sometimes even makes some groups feel a sense of not belonging. This toolkit facilitates an understanding of how the design of continually refurbished indoor informal educational spaces on university campuses contributes to students’ sense of belonging. Indoor campus spaces can generally be classified by function into educational and non-educational areas. Educational spaces typically include classrooms, studios, and libraries, while non-educational spaces encompass administrative offices, canteens, cafés, and student accommodation. The former are considered formal educational spaces, which differ from the informal educational environments discussed in this toolkit. Although learning-related interactions often occur in non-educational spaces, such as cafés and canteens, these areas are not intentionally designed to support educational activities. In contrast, the informal educational spaces we explore are purposefully designed to facilitate learning, yet they also possess qualities that distinguish them from traditional formal learning environments. To capture the unique role of these spaces, we propose a new term at the conclusion of this toolkit: bridging space."