Immersive Virtual Reality Environments: a proposal to enhance preservice teacher’s communicative competences

This paper addresses a real need for an interactive tool to gather evidence on relevant emotions involved in classroom conflict management while providing learners with an experiential opportunity, feedback, and feedforward to improve classroom management and communicative skills. Hence, the classroom conflict transformation occurs into a learning opportunity. This research plan proposes implementing an experiential and experimental initial training program to train preservice teachers as a module to complement the Secondary School Teaching, Vocational Training, and Language Teaching master’s Degree’s current curriculum. Virtual Reality Learning Environment (VRLE) allows users to embody learning experiences to produce intense and real emotional sensations. At the same time, a VRLE recreates a real Secondary School classroom gathered from school disciplinary reports and preservice teachers’ observations during their field practicum. Exposure to these VRLE scenarios will allow instant learners’ feedback and feedforward, so they start noticing the most crucial aspects of the classroom environment: immediacy, simultaneity, and unpredictability. Finally, it discusses the research question, the proposed methodology, solutions, and contributions to initial teacher training to enhance preservice teacher’s communicative competences