Apprehension and Affect as Mediated Learning in Virtual-Reality Museum Exhibits of Holocaust Survivors

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Theories of Media, Culture, and Learning: Past, Current, and Future Directions

Abstract

This paper contributes to the knowledge base on embodied, visceral approaches to learning with media by thinking through data from museum digital media exhibits with the theoretical concept of apprehension (Barker, 2009). This concept is a critically inflected, phenomenological theorizing used to understand how specific moments of Holocaust education invite museum visitors to grasp on to feelings, moods, moments, events, and sensations occurring during the experience of different virtual reality installations of survivors’ testimonies. This study suggests pedagogical gestures extended for learners and the affects that circulate within these virtual reality experiences produce bodily sensations through which we would rather not see, and, in some instances, that from which we reactively turn away.

Author

• Mark Helmsing, George Mason University