Exploring students’ immersive VR experiences as resources for collaborative meaning making and learning

By adopting a situated and interactional approach, we explore students’ immersive VR experiences as resources for collaborative meaning making and learning. We draw on data from a project in which teachers and researchers co-developed a learning design for upper secondary students involving immersive VR technology. In this learning design, students viewed a cinematic VR film where they encountered different people telling personal stories about exclusion and discrimination, followed by reflective group dialogues with their teacher about their experiences in this environment. Through a detailed interaction analysis of these dialogues, we identify four dimensions that characterize students’ meaning making: (1) the feeling of taking part in conversations, (2) attending to bodily expressions of others, (3) students’ own bodily responses, (4) teacher guidance. We discuss how the findings from our analysis contribute to the field of CSCL, and which also have implications for instructional work that includes the use of immersive VR environments.