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Introduction: virtual reality in fieldwork
The place of fieldwork in geography has been well-regarded among curriculum makers of the subject as a beneficial component of students' educational experience (Kent, Gilbertson and Hunt, 1997). In a Singaporean context, fieldwork takes the form of geographical investigations (GI) and is used as a signature pedagogy to support students' capacity to think geographically (Jackson, 2006) and provide them with opportunities to construct and test knowledge in the real world (Hammond, 2018).
Pre-COVID, students travelled to field sites to collect and analyse data. They evaluated the strengths and limitations of their GI before reflecting on their understanding of the geographical phenomena. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting movement restrictions propelled us to consider blended learning (Ştefan, 2012) for students to conduct GI on both virtual and physical platforms. As Sloggett (2021) argues, meeting the challenges of COVID-19 can prompt us to think afresh, and stimulate us to revise our ways of organising fieldwork.
The use of VR in geography education is not new. Skinner's (2018) article offers a good guide to using a desktop application to simulate rainfall events and to investigate the impact of a flash flood in a virtual river valley, a simulation based on real-world data with high classroom applicability. Matthews (2020) creates fieldwork sessions using existing VR resources to bring virtual glacial landscapes into the classroom. Inspired by these attempts to review fieldwork provisions during COVID-19 restrictions, the lesson sequence described here encapsulates our rethinking of the curriculum-making process, by incorporating Virtual Reality (VR) to bring the field to students. Virtual fieldwork is a 'representation of a specific geographical area using digital images and/or photographs/ video' (Taylor, 2005, p. 157), and we wanted to demonstrate how VR resources can be created by teachers and subsequently used to augment a blended learning lesson. Not only do these resources allow students to explore the 'atmosphere' of a place (Brand, 2020) by experiencing the sights and sounds of the virtual field site, but we argue that VR fieldwork is especially useful in enhancing students' understanding of two key stages of an enquiry approach (Roberts, 2003): 'Using data' and 'Making sense and connections' (Figure 1).
Pre-lesson preparations
To create a virtual field site, we combined 360° video clips and...