Disrupting teachers’ knowledge and practice: augmented reality in out-of-classroom settings

Learning outside the classroom has long been a desired feature of many countries’ education systems and school curricula and continues to be reflected in local curriculum documentation. In spite of a growing academic focus on learning outside the classroom as pedagogy, literature reports concerns that, as a practice, it is declining in contemporary classrooms. One of the challenges facing teachers designing out-of-classroom learning experiences is that the change in physical location represents more than a change in the teaching and learning setting. The move from in-classroom to out-of-classroom settings fundamentally changes the ways in which teachers need to consider, and reconsider, their professional knowledge and the enactment of that knowledge. This paper reports on a pilot investigation which aims to provide greater opportunities for teachers to participate in learning outside the classroom which is also connected to within-the-classroom learning through the use of emerging Augmented Reality technology. The paper reports on an existing but as yet untested AR technology developed by the authors to enhance the educative experience of the 38,000 annual student visitors to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. The use of AR technology in this context aims to provide students and teachers with access to unique educative materials highlighting connections and tensions between Aboriginal ecological and cultural perspectives and Western ecological sustainability science. This paper outlines a number of benefits of this approach while also reporting on the technical challenges associated in developing such an application together with the disruptions such an approach brings to teachers’ technological, pedagogical content knowledge. The paper concludes with an elaborated model to further extend earlier conceptualisations of teachers’ technological, pedagogical content knowledge.