Dr. des Nicola Przybylka: Current Discourses on AR and VR in Educational Contexts

The lecture examines the discursive negotiation of AR and VR media in educational contexts, reconstructed from marketing promises and subject-didactic negotiations in geography, history and physical education. Its focus is, first, on the phantasm associated with virtual reality of being transported into other bodies, other times or any place in the world, and, second, on the added value attributed to augmented reality: making the invisible visible and enabling anything to be brought into one’s ‘personal space’ at any time.

This claim to universal availability needs to be interrogated from a power-critical perspective: who is to be granted access to what, and to whose perspectives? Which media-material conditions are obscured in the process? Moreover, current discourses on AR and VR are shaped by a logic of intensification that links media-technological progress with learning success, while obscuring the complex relations between body, technology and surrounding space.

The lecture argues that these narratives, which certainly stand within a media-cultural tradition, should not be dismissed as mere advertising rhetoric. Instead, their specific manifestations in subject-didactic conceptualisations and in app design need to be taken seriously.