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Virtual Training, Virtual Teachers: On Capacities and Being-at-Work

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Soon we’ll be operating by remote control on patients we never see…We’ll be nothing but button pushers. All the skill is going out of surgery…All the know-how and make-do.

William S. Burroughs (2001, p. 51).

Abstract

While virtual simulations are a familiar professional training tool, they have only recently been implemented in teacher education programs. These simulations are used to complement traditional student teacher placement. In this paper, the author critically examines one teacher training simulation, TeachLivE, specifically in terms of its implicit conceptions of what it means to teach and to learn. The analysis utilizes Aristotle’s explanation of the Greek concepts energeia and dunamis, as well as Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The author argues that TeachLivE’s structure implies an ontology of teaching and learning that precludes the cultivation of a teacherly disposition, and that, were this ontology to be corrected, teacher training simulations would be rendered superfluous.

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Notes

  1. The program has received significant funding from The Gates Foundation, and has been commercialized under the name “Mursion”.

  2. Joe Sachs, following Heidegger, translates energeia as “being-at-work,” while others, such as Charlotte Witt or Stephen Makin, choose the more traditional translation of “actual” or “actuality.” This paper uses the Sachs/Heidegger translation.

  3. Avatars are two dimensional digital models of humans that can be controlled either by a human or by pre-programmed software. TLE labels itself a “mixed reality” simulation because, unlike an immersive virtual reality simulation in which participants interact only with programmed software, the teachers are in a physical classroom interacting through a screen with a live adult human.

  4. The actors themselves are trained, person-to-person, during a “two-week intensive boot camp,” at the end of which “new interactors would be ranked and cleared for scheduling on TeachLivE avatars for which they have demonstrated proficiency.

    University of Central Florida Foundation, “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Final Report,” 18-22.

  5. It is not evident that an immersive virtual reality platform would alleviate the dimensional problems with TeachLivE identified in this paper.

  6. Similar to Kant’s critique of Leibniz, Descartes, and Berkeley, Aristotle chose to critique the Megarians because he agreed with their basic premise of prioritizing the actual but disagreed on details.

  7. Pace Dreyfus.

  8. A doctor’s interactions with the world, for example, are defined by “doctor-ing” or “medicine-ing”.

  9. The name itself, TeachLivE, points towards this priority with the word “Live”.

  10. In fact, as noted above, the unreality of the simulation is one of it’s advantages.

  11. Note the similarities to aspects of Dreyfus’ argument above.

  12. And “in” means bodily, corporeally “in”.

  13. It is important to note that I am not endorsing “context-free” simulations for aviation and medicine. As clarified above, such simulations would be impossible under the Aristotelian-Heideggerian premises I have articulated.

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  1. Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

    Kenneth Driggers

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Driggers, K. Virtual Training, Virtual Teachers: On Capacities and Being-at-Work. Stud Philos Educ 42, 585–597 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-023-09898-0

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