Literary education and reading promotion supported in immersive literary environments with augmented reality

Abstract

The immersive literary environments (ILE) are educational settings designed on the basis of physical objects that recreate children’s literature works. They also provide digital information overlapped with augmented reality (AR), favouring immersive learning, coming from the interaction with several elements introducing activities. With this qualitative research-focused on cases study-we intend: a) to analyse 25 ILE created by pre-service teachers (N=95), intended to promote literary education and reading in preschool education. Two dimensions are considered: a) technological-interactive, describing the support and the AR resources, and b) educational and literary, identifying and quantifying the types of texts and activities. 2) To determine the satisfaction level of the preservice teachers at the end of the experience, by means of a survey. The results reveal that the ILE-based on literary texts-recreate fictional worlds with AR resources, bringing characters to life and including activities with and without AR. 64% of the ILE employ models, 24% a lapbook and the rest prioritise other supports, including AR coloring pages, videos, characters’ animations, online games, AR markers, QR codes, etc. The innovative experience became very satisfactory for pre-service teachers, who took profit of AR opportunities to design activities for literary education and to promote a playful and multisensory learning.