Seeing the Past or Reasoning About It? Virtual Reality in History Education

Vinod Kumar Kanvaria; Surabhi Verma

doi:10.63081/uejtl.v3i2.182

Authors

Vinod Kumar Kanvaria Department of Education, University of Delhi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6801-1652
Surabhi Verma Department of Education, University of Delhi https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8593-8808

Virtual Reality, Historical thinking, Pedagogical implications, Disciplinary reasoning, Educational technology

Abstract

History teaching has been through long-standing criticisms of forcing students to memorize facts and dates, and history's associations as a set body of knowledge that is not useful or relevant. History teaching that is informed by historical thinking has been established by educational research that supports the approach of learning history as making historical judgments from historical evidence, context, and perspective. The compelling qualities of VR technologies are seen as promising educational affordances for history education. This study investigates the potential of VR for use in history education by examining it through a historical thinking lens. This qualitative, conceptual, analytical investigation, based on a literature-based inquiry rather than empirical data collection, provides an overview of the existing literature on historical thinking and the current state of the art in VR-based research in history education. The results describe how VR might be well-suited to historical thinking as an interdisciplinary practice and identify possible affordances in terms of contextualization, historical empathy, historical causation, and evidence-based inquiry. Idealizing is followed by unavoidable risk associated with three things: simplistic reconstitutions of the past, uncritical acceptance of virtual reconstitutions of the past, and novelty overtaking the rigor of a historical investigation. Situated in a history of theories of teaching and learning, we argue that engaging VR can be regarded as an affordance for a disciplined form of historical thinking.

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