Research Question: How can augmented reality facilitate the critical digital pedagogical design of a cultural heritage mobile learning educational application (app)? 

Abstract: Enshrined within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is recognition of the right to cultural expression and preservation of tradition. Whereby, as stated explicitly in the UDHR, “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancements and its benefits” (United Nations 1948). Working within the UDHR rights-based approach and its application to the digitalisation of cultural heritage, this research explores augmented reality (AR), Critical Digital Pedagogy (CDP) and education technology (EdTech). CDP refers to a resolutely crucial engagement with the extent to which digital learning technologies can be used to challenge endemic inequality through a focus on equality, diversity and inclusion in their manufacture, distribution and utilisation in classroom teaching and learning practice. Augmented reality is a deeply contentious resource when viewed from the perspective of CDP and this is largely because of the prevalence of enterprises from the Global North selling to the Global South, prefabricated augmented reality packages mirroring the commodity-form of the capitalist mode of production along with its unrelenting surplus value extraction and inequalities of capital over labour. It is in this respect and context that augmented reality is explored as an EdTech resource for the teaching and learning of the digitalisation of cultural heritage. Existing limitations in the EdTech use of augmented reality are identified, explored and challenged. The scope and scale of the advantages of AR-based EdTech are considered in respect to its ‘facilitating’ role in the transforming of physical and analogue culture into a mobile learning resource delivered through a cultural heritage digital application (app). In order to explore the national and international significance of the local situational context of augmented reality and classroom practice, the logic that informs the research’s selection and use of methods is guided by the Sociological Imagination (Mills 1959).  Using the methodology of ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills 1959), workshop-as-method is deployed in two Afro-British community heritage centres. Augmented reality provides the basis and theme for the workshop-as-method activity. Empirical data derived from these practice-based events is directed at exploring the extent to which augmented reality can facilitate the CDP collaborative learning and teaching practice of creating a cultural heritage app. Implications of the empirical findings are outlined and examined in terms of classroom practice and also the extent to which the research data can assist community heritage centres in their transition from physical spaces of cultural belonging to hybrid digital spaces of virtual community.