Pedagogical attachments and Virtual Reality: on immersion with digital technology in school

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.