Embodied Pedagogy with Virtual Reality

By  Caterina Fugazzola, Senior Instructional Professor in the Global Studies Program and a past Associate Pedagogy Fellow in the CCTL

This past spring, I tried something exciting and a little terrifying in one of my courses: I took a pedagogical gamble and trusted that I could guide my class to ground abstract theoretical concepts in their lived, embodied experiences…by taking students out of their physical bodies and having them grapple with said concepts through Virtual Reality (VR). If you have never seen someone put on a VR headset for the first time, let me tell you about a pattern I noticed and that I find fascinating. It doesn’t matter if they are entering a hyper-realistic nature simulation, a futuristic game, or a virtual classroom, there are two things that happen almost immediately. The first is a wide turn of the head, usually a full 180 from side to side—taking in the new space, orienting themselves as they figure out their new surroundings. The second is my favorite, and it’s a long, intense look downward towards their hands—finding their new selves, confirming their physical existence in the virtual body they are now inhabiting. It’s a simple, yet unavoidable moment, and one that is ripe with pedagogical opportunities.  

In the past year and a half, I have made it my mission to figure out a way to unravel the strange paradox of the body in VR—a digital creation that somehow constantly forces users to reckon with their own physicality—and to capitalize on the pedagogical openings provided by this technology. Opportunities for embodied learning experiences are scarce in a college classroom: despite the increasing incorporation of experiential learning in our teaching, the vast majority of student intellectual engagement treats learning as if it were a completely disembodied experience. The Life of the Mind far too often makes us forget that our minds are housed in flesh-and-bone bodies. It’s a problematic omission, and one that I strive to challenge in all of my classes: I teach courses on global politics, on gender and sexuality, on social change—sidelining the body in those conversations would be intellectually and pedagogically disingenuous. So how do we bring the body into our teaching in a very practical, tangible way? When we teach about politics and identity, how can we show students the deep connection between the theoretical conversations they are encountering in the literature and the physical, concrete meaning they take in the world beyond academia? 

These questions led me to develop Crossing Boundaries, a course focused on exploration and discussion of virtual worlds and experiences. The post-colon part of the course title (where would academia be without our colons) promises a focus on “virtual reality, embodiment, and the reimagining of social space,” and indeed my goal when creating the course was to offer a learning experience that forces students to use their body, and their embodied adventures in VR, as a lens to engage in conversations on topics ranging from gender and performativity, to immigration and displacement, to urban design and community building. Something I had to figure out early on during course development was how to frame exercises so they can become moments of reflection: as much as I love introducing new technologies in the classroom, I learned quickly that they can easily get in the way of our pedagogical objectives unless they are properly scaffolded—particularly when they are objectively fun.  

With the help of my wonderful research assistant Lana Yevzlin (a recent UChicago graduate—we do have the best students), I spent a summer testing out a few approaches that allowed us to balance the joy, excitement, and freedom of VR adventures with the more complicated and often less joyful sociological reflections such adventures are meant to stimulate. For example, when the course launched in Spring 2025, one of our first activities was a group exercise on avatar creation in VRChat, a platform where users can interact with each other in a seemingly infinite selection of 3D virtual worlds. Students had the freedom to try out any avatar they wanted in a particular world, Prismic’s Avatar Search, and they had time to look at their new chosen form in the large mirror taking over a full wall of the avatar creation room. For every student experimenting with their new virtual self, two other peers in our physical reality were armed with a worksheet and with questions for the VR adventurer. Groups were directed towards conversations on movement and embodiment—the inevitable look at one’s hands, the change in posture and behavior as one becomes a cat, a dragon, a tiny humanoid robot. Following discussion, we pressed on in subsequent meetings to discuss self, identity, and identity exploration—with a healthy dose of theoretical conversations on micro-interactions, performativity, and the “doing” of identities.  

With those discussions fresh in our mind, the following week we had students engage with the first of the more curated VR exercises, designed to bring the body front and center. Individually, each student spent around 15 minutes in Body of Mine, an experimental storytelling experience created by the artist Cameron Kostopoulos where users are put in the body of someone with a different gender than their own while being guided to learn from the stories of numerous trans individuals who participated in the project. 

The experience is deeply personal and unequivocally embodied: for the entirety of it, the user is standing in front of a mirror that appears to be located inside a human body, with a large heart gently beating in the upper left corner of one’s field of vision. The narrative journey invites users to look at themselves, both through the mirror and by looking down and around, taking stock of unfamiliar body parts, feeling the discomfort of a body that doesn’t quite fit their imagined self. There are of course limits to any exercise in radical empathy, but the journey fostered meaningful class conversations in ways that pushed past the abstract, intellectual realm. Students first resisted, then embraced the discomfort of this virtual journey, and it was through this generative discomfort that we were able to link our previous theoretical conversation to their embodied experience.  

One of my favorite parts of the course was seeing students question and resist the embodied possibilities of VR, only to be faced time and time again with their own visceral, bodily reactions during the weekly VR experiences. In true UChicago fashion, they were perfectly comfortable discussing articles, unpacking theoretical arguments, and seeing academic written work as a viable path towards knowledge and meaning making. But VR experiences? They were skeptical. During a particularly heated discussion, they all expressed understandable outrage at the thought that VR storytelling could teach us anything about the plight of displaced individuals in a war zone. Then they played Home After War, where they heard the story of Ahmaied, an Iraqi father returning to Fallujah and having to contend with the threat of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in his home and neighborhood. They walked through Ahmaied’s home while he spoke to them and told them of his personal tragedy when he lost his sons to an explosion. A device explodes at this point of the narration, simulating the effects of an IED going off—a few seconds of white light, ringing in the ears, complete disorientation. Students wrote their weekly reports and shared how powerful that moment had been for them by emphasizing their physical reactions—heart pounding, hands sweating, shaking. One of them wrote: “my brain couldn’t differentiate between physical danger and the simulated bomb explosion in the slightest.” Class discussion the following day was one of the highlights of the quarter.  

Ultimately, the hope for this course was that this model—a combination of guided embodied experiences, theoretical readings, and personal journeys that allow the students to contend with theoretical concepts by feeling them on their (virtual) skin—would help us contextualize even topics that don’t immediately register as embodied experiences in the minds of our students. Migration journeys, the salience of borders, the impact of architectural choices on community building—VR offers unique opportunities for the kind of experiential learning that drives home the connection between intellectual inquiry and real-world consequences and applications. As paradoxical a solution as it might seem, then, I think I found a way to incorporate the body and embodied experiences into our teaching—all we had to do as a class was leave the physical world, and instead dive head (and body!) first into the virtual.