The way in which education is being delivered in England is faltering. A study by the National Foundation for Education Research found that 44 per cent more teachers stated their intention to leave the profession in 2022–23 compared to the previous year (McClean et.al., 2024) and 150,000 state school pupils were classed as ‘severely absent’ in 2022–23 (Adams, 2024). This suggests that a significant number of teachers, and students, are rejecting schools in their current guise. Technologically imminent classrooms – embedding the opportunity for students to use emerging technologies such as IVR (immersive virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) – within everyday learning, could offer an essential reimagining, and transformation, of classroom spaces.

My research involved planning and delivering English lessons with KS3 students using IVR, within an economically deprived ex-mining community in England. I wanted to prove that prioritising technological imminence – something that had enabled mining communities to economically flourish in the second industrial revolution – could play a part in enhancing young people’s experiences of education, through interactions with the technology of the fourth industrial revolution. Access to novel technologies such as AR and IVR have been found to have a positive impact on academic achievement and student participation (Kalemkuş & Kalemkuş, 2022), as well as benefiting the development of affective skills and empathy (Stavroulia & Lanitis, 2023).

The findings of my research centred on how IVR impacted on the development of students’ cultural and techno-capital. Cultural capital, a concept initially conceived by Pierre Bourdieu (1986), refers to non-financial social assets, such as education and cultural knowledge, that influence social mobility. Techno-capital is an off-shoot of Bourdieu’s original concept, defined by Choi and colleagues (2021) as the ability to competently, creatively and critically interact with technology. Students developed the quality and quantity of their creative writing using the IVR experience Jurassic Blue as a stimulus. This demonstrated how IVR could provide insights to places and experiences that students would not ordinarily have had access to, and the positive impact this then had on students’ approaches to creative writing. Students also explored IVR narratives and designed virtual worlds to situate and plan their own stories using Open Brush. These findings align with Nanjappan and colleagues’ (2023) study, which found that virtual environments have the potential to enhance creative skills. IVR developed students’ techno-capital by enabling structured and practical interactions with the technology embedded into the structure of a ‘typical’ English lesson, which increased students’ competencies and confidence, particularly around setting up the equipment and troubleshooting issues. Students could also assess their perceptions of IVR in terms of its educative value, by identifying opportunities where it could benefit knowledge and understanding of a particular topic or text, reflecting Choi and colleagues’ (2021) vision of techno-capital.

‘Incorporating novel technologies into the curriculum could create further opportunities for students to develop cultural and techno-capital, providing more equitable learning opportunities for all students.’

Placing imminent technologies like IVR in the reality of a classroom reveals barriers, particularly around the cost of equipment, physical space, ethical dilemmas around physical safety, and cybersickness, not to mention the time for teachers to develop its use in the classroom. This is demonstrative of larger problems around the issue of funding, staffing and resources in state schools. However, I believe – in light of the statistics shared at the beginning of this post – that there has never been a more important time to prompt a rethinking of schools as spaces of technological imminence. Incorporating novel technologies into the curriculum could create further opportunities for students to develop cultural and techno-capital, providing more equitable learning opportunities for all students.

References

Adams, R. (2024, February 29). Number of children home-schooled in England rises by more than 10,000. Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/feb/29/number-of-children-home-schooled-in-england-rises-by-more-than-10000.

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The Forms of Capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood Press.

Choi, J. R., Straubhaar, J., Skouras, M., Park, S., Santillana, M., & Strover, S. (2021). Techno-capital: Theorizing media and information literacy through information technology capabilities. New Media & Society, 23(7), 1989–2011. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820925800

Department for Education [DfE]. (2024). Pupil absence in schools in England. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/pupil-absence-in-schools-in-england

Kalemkuş, J., & Kalemkuş, F. (2022). Effect of the use of augmented reality applications on academic achievement of student in science education: Meta-analysis review. Interactive Learning Environments, 31(9), 6017–6034. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2022.2027458

McLean, D., Worth, J., & Smith, A. (2024). Teacher labour market in England: Annual report. National Foundation For Educational Research.

Nanjappan V., Uunila, A., Vaulanen, J., Välimaa, J., Georgiev, G. V. (2023). Effects of immersive virtual reality in enhancing creativity. Proceedings of the Design Society, 3, 1585–1594. https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2023.159

Stavroulia, K. E., & Lanitis, A. (2023) The role of perspective-taking on empowering the empathetic behavior of educators in VR-based training sessions: An experimental evaluation. Computers & Education, 197, 104739. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2023.104739.