Educational Virtual World as screen based uses of the senses: implications of body configurations

The analytical framework of this paper draws on the iterative interaction of the complex arrangement of bodies and objects in physical and virtual settings using screens at school. Educational Virtual World (VW) is an active field in full evolution. The metaphor of incorporation (Galeja, 2011) allows us to avoid such a dichotomous relationship: it expresses the phenomenon of immersion or presence as an assimilation into the consciousness of the game world in a manner that is coextensive with our being in the physical world. This does not imply that the two are equal, but rather that the physical and the virtual are both aspects of what we perceive as real. Thus, the body becomes present in both the physical world and cyberspace: the interface adapts to the body and the body adapts to the interface. C. Goodwin (2000) writes that the notion of embodiment encompasses orientation, gesture, and intonation, among other physical aspects of interaction. The moment-to-moment arrangement of these various semiotic fields is called contextual configuration. This contextual configuration changes during the course of action: new semiotic fields can be brought in and old ones treated as irrelevant, adapting with the new proposals. With VW, the body becomes the main interface of interaction, manipulating the information available through senses. Incorporation into the VW is an experience of involving cognition, emotion, and imagery into a narrative (Granic et al., 2014).Hence, the paper focuses on the features of embodiment configurations when using the virtual world in the classroom. We aim to determine how the body and materiality enter into contextual configurations and gain their significance in relation to the physical and virtual setting , where screen based uses of the senses are focused on using avatars, a special spatial and temporal configuration of current reality.The methodology is applied in the context of a secondary school (students aged 11-15) adopting an educational immersive 3D virtual world. We conducted a participatory action research enabling us to undertake participant observation, collecting video-audio records supported by students focus group and teachers’ interviews. Specifically, we focus on a dataset consisting in five video recordings of teaching lessons (of about 45 minutes), one teacher interview (37.41 minutes) and a focus group with students (37.09 minutes). The five teaching sessions consist of: - Four sessions in the classroom with the use of VW concerning math, French, English and Italian, taking part in the Interdisciplinary and Language projects. The classroom is composed of 20-22 students (about 11-13 years old). All of them are very familiar with the VW. - One VW session in math from the Homework done project. The session involved 3-4 students (10-11 years old) guided by a teacher. We started by reviewing each video recording session closely to understand its structure and interactional ordering from the participants’ perspectives. For this, we repeated our searches in the data to find relevant clips based on the criteria above. We selected topical episodes [9] [13] to carry out a more detailed embodied interaction analysis, which was transcribed and qualitatively analyzed.Our results highlight the dynamic ways in which the arrangement of bodies and material acted as a mediational means between real and virtual settings. We highlight within these setting how senses are engaged and the limits it encounters to do it. In this paper, the use of the VW focuses more on incorporation – absorption and transportation – than on immersion. Players are productively bound to these virtual environments via the social and cultural codes that are designed into the scenario and incorporated through the role of avatars in screen based uses to the senses ; these codes are also acquired through the remediation practices of everyday life by the student.As didactic implications, adopting and integrating educational VW into the classroom requires the teacher to design teaching sessions that change traditional modalities to foster students engagement in learning. Sessions with VW must mobilize the curriculum content with the teacher’s creative scaffolding able to deal with incorporation to anchor screen based uses of the senses at school.