Virtual Environments: Issues and Opportunities for Researching Inclusive Educational Practices

Abstract

Virtual environments offer new research areas for those concerned with inclusive education. This paper considers the affordances offered by virtual environments for the development of inclusive educational pedagogies. It considers the relationship between specific features of inclusive pedagogy, derived from an international systematic literature review, and the affordances of different virtual environments. Examples are drawn from research in Second Life, virtual tutors and augmented reality. In doing this the paper challenges a simplistic notion of the virtual environment and indicates opportunities for researching and developing inclusive educational practice.