LEARNING TO COPE WITH IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES : A LIFE-WIDE PERSPECTIVE

Sarah Campbell, SCEPTrE Placement Student (Level 2 Psychology), University of Surrey

Part of learning to be professional involves being able to cope with immersive experiences –  experiences that require total engagement: that are initially confounding but require mastery. To gain insights into how students understood this concept SCEPTrE sponsored a story telling competition on the theme of ‘Immersive Experiences’ : stories could be about experiences from any part of life that the person felt was immersive. Whilst the stories were very diverse in nature, and covered a vast range of contexts and experiences, the use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) identified very clear themes, all of which were present in almost all accounts. These themes provide an insight into what distinguishes a particular experience as being immersive.

Sense of journey – beginning (excitement), middle (overwhelmed), end (mastery)

Motivation – and the emotions associated with motivation

The will to be immersed – people chose to act in an immersive way

Presentation of situational status – justifies difficulties experienced and validates involvement of self in an immersive way

Balance/inbalance - many participants experienced great inbalance in terms of their immersive context and other facets of their lives

Support from others – often strangers become supporters

Loss of identity/role – transformational change with all the emotions that entails

Perspective change - this cognitive reappraisal or perspective change often gave rise to the changes in the person and the learning.

Paradox – creates dissonance, and therefore a need to change

Contextual sensitivity - greater awareness through the process of comparing what they experienced to a wider context

Change – leave behind, take on new, integrate.

It is clear that an immersive experience is incredibly challenging, and often the discomfort is what drives the person to change or learn, leading to the emergence of a richer person with new perspectives and understanding. Such experiences can be encountered in many different aspects of life – the family, travel, work or volunteering – they are truly life-wide in their origin. Immersive experiences, it would appear, are incredibly rich as learning experiences, and the learning that occurs is life-long learning; that can be applied to a plethora of situations and contexts, rather than the learning being context-specific.

Key words : immersive experience, life-wide learning