In the course of a typical school day, members of the school community - staff and students alike - traverse the campus several times a day, sometimes being exposed directly to the elements, while at other times in the shade. the paths we take as we traverse our campus reflect our tacit responses to such exposure. Through our own bodily experience, we therefore develop over time a textured map of our respective school campuses which - in turn - influences our decision-making in subconscious ways. the mark of the skilful teacher is how to design for opportunities for such tacit knowledge to be made more explicit, in order for students to connect their everyday embodied lived experiences in authentic ways with the formal codified domain knowledge of the classroom.
In 2015, we published a paper in the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) in which we described an intervention where we advanced a pedagogical strategy we termed Collaborative Observation, as part of our work on the Six Learnings curriculum design framework. In this paper, we addressed the problem of how teachers could effectively manage and scaffold the learning experiences of pupils in large classes (typically, forty pupils per class), particularly when the learners are operating as avatars in an immersive environment. In that paper, we compared three different conditions, namely learners in a 1:1 ratio with a computer, learners in a 1:40 ratio sharing the use of a single computer, and traditional didactic instruction; we successfully advanced the case for Collaborative Observation: namely, learners in a 1:40 ratio sharing the use of a single computer.
In 2020, we followed up with a second paper in BJET, this time describing the construct of what we term as Learner-Generated Augmentation. The latter describes activities in which the learners are given opportunities to augment (through Augmented Reality tools) their local environments, thereby giving teachers better insight in to which aspects of their local environments students find significant and meaningful. More often than not – the elements in their environments which novices might choose to annotate would be different from those which the teacher (as domain expert) might choose. In the hands of a skilled teacher, such differences represent rich opportunities for discussion and mutual learning. Learner-Generated Augmentation acknowledges where the learners are coming from, helps make their otherwise tacit conceptions more visible to the teacher, and has applications in the sciences as well as in the humanities.
When we published these two papers, the interventions we had designed to test them were founded on two very different - almost conceptually oppositional - premises and contexts. The effectiveness of Collaborative Observation as a pedagogical strategy was proven in the context of a virtual world, while that of Learner-Generated Augmentation was proven in the context of augmented reality.
Such are the affordances of the Apple Vision Pro that they permit the convergence of premise and context from 2015 and 2020. This is what is meant when Apple advances the paradigm of 'spatial computing'.
The body’s contribution to meaning-making is foregrounded in a creative experience. Engagement of different aspects of the body, namely the physical, and the psychological aspects, in a creative experience is key in meaning-making by students.
As a wearable, the Vision Pro lends itself naturally to the notion of embodiment, in that – in such cases – the learners’ auditory and visual sensory inputs are augmented by the affordances of whatever apps the learners are using, but also that the apps have a certain degree of geospatial permanence within the augmented world of the learner.
Thus, for example, it is perfectly possible for a scenario of a field-based lesson in which the learners are annotating their local environments as they explore their neighbourhood, leaving digital notes (such as text and sketches) at locations and sites that they themselves consider significant. In the context of a lesson unit, learners could be tasked to cast or to record their screens as they explore their environments and annotate them, for subsequent post-activity discussion in either small groups or as a class, as facilitated by the skilful teacher.
