Teaching case study · 2019
Teaching virtual reality.
A student can point to a passage in a novel. What can they point to when the experience happened inside a headset?
theBlu
A whale’s perceived size becomes a bodily encounter.
Tilt Brush
Painting becomes a space the student can inhabit.
Rez Infinite
Movement, sound and animation shape each other.
“Codifying without depersonalising”
Pedagogies of small datumThe teaching question
From “wow” to an argument.
A monitor could show what a student saw in VR. It could not convey the same sense of scale, movement or presence.
I wanted to help students describe and examine their responses while retaining the differences between their experiences. In my 2019 talk, I called this “pedagogies of small datum”.
The approach
Experience in conversation.
My teaching brought four strands together, each changing how students understood the others.
Theory
Bodies · identity · virtual space
Creative works
Literature · film · art · games
Contemporary questions
Representation · access · ethics
First-hand experience
Movement · sensation · presence
Read a text. Try an experience. Return with a different question.
Proposed in the talk
Giving reflection a structure.
I proposed using prompts, wordbanks and student-authored questions to help connect felt experience with critical interpretation.
Read more about the teaching argument
In Teaching Virtual Reality in the Humanities: Pedagogies of Small Datum, I asked how a personal, embodied encounter could become academic evidence. A shared text gives a seminar group something to return to. First-hand VR experiences can be harder to compare and articulate.
Works such as Ghost in the Shell and Snow Crash offered ways to discuss embodiment, social context and the ethics of entering someone else’s world. Practical encounters could bring students back to those texts with different questions.
The talk proposed trialling post-experience questionnaires, prompts and wordbanks. Students would also develop some of these materials themselves from theoretical and creative texts earlier in the term, then use their experiences to test expectations and revisit earlier ideas.
Gender, race, age and disability mattered to this process. Embodied experience does not begin from a single, neutral position. How can an assessment make room for those differences while asking students to support their interpretations with evidence?
Based on my script and slides for the 5th Digital Research Conversation, University of Birmingham, 2019. The illustrations are abstract impressions of the three works discussed in the talk, not images from them. Reflection tools are described as proposals at that date.