Pedagogical attachments and virtual reality
On immersion with digital technology in school
Publication date
2025-10-16
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Organisational unit
Publisher
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
Series or journal
Critical Studies in Education
ISSN
First page
1
Last page
19
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Keyword
Virtual reality
Attachment
Immersion
Vocational
Education and training
Ethnography
Science and technology studies
School education
Abstract
This paper explores what comes to matter pedagogically when introducing Virtual Reality (VR) in Vocational Education and Training (VET) schools. In spite of the general understanding that digital technologies rarely work as anticipated, research exploring how VR unfolds in schools and how it gives way to specific pedagogical forms of acting, thinking, and relating to others, is scarcer. Addressing this gap, we explicate our ethnographic fieldwork in one Belgian school through sensitivities derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS). Specifically, thinking with the concept of ‘attachment’ (and its corollary ‘detachment’) to indicate how educational ways of being are continuously in the making in classroom practices, our fieldwork shows how different types of attachments (i.e. communizing, instancing, modulating, conditioning), that emerge through concrete and heterogeneous acts, relate to different forms of ‘immersion’. Conclusively, the paper discusses the need to further unpack how technologies always come to matter pedagogically in specific ways and argues that an appropriate terminology is necessary to articulate this. To this extent, we propose the concepts of ‘pedagogical attachments’ and immersion to enunciate the pedagogical specificity of what is at stake when introducing digital technologies in the classroom.
Description
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
licenses/by/4.0/.
Version
Published version
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Metadata only access