In November 2015, middle-school students from Westchester County, New York, found themselves on a windswept field in South Sudan mingling with a crowd of refugees fleeing civil war. Suddenly, they heard the deafening roar of low-flying military cargo planes overhead, followed by large bags of grain thudding to the ground all around them.
“The kids were jumping back from those bags dropping at their feet,” recalled Cayne Letizia, the teacher who used immersive virtual reality (VR) to transport his class into this emergency food drop featured in the New York Times 360-degree video series about refugees. Count Letizia among VR’s burgeoning fan base in education, where the spread of high-quality content and more-affordable hardware (especially Google’s $15 Cardboard Viewer) gives students myriad ways to briefly inhabit what they’re learning—from wandering the streets of ancient Rome to touring the International Space Station.
Education researchers caution that immersive VR, like any technology, may be perfect for some kinds of learning and superfluous, or even counterproductive, for others. Studies of immersive classroom VR are still scarce. But emerging evidence suggests that one of VR’s biggest strengths is its ability to tap student emotions, notably empathy and the can-do confidence known as self-efficacy.
The power of VR to stoke empathy is the focus of research at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, led by communications professor Jeremy Bailenson. In the lab’s “Empathy at Scale” studies, young people who “wear” an elderly avatar, for example, are then more inclined to save for retirement.* Some other studies have found that embodying avatars of other races can reduce racial bias. Charities, including the International Red Cross, have made VR films to counteract “compassion fatigue” and boost donations.
Empathy isn’t a subject in most schools and it’s not an explicit part of the Common Core standards, noted Letizia, an English teacher who parlayed the emotional connections of immersion into reading and writing lessons in the power of narrative and authorial point of view. Still, he thinks empathy needs to be taught, especially (and perhaps ironically) due to how much time we spend interacting digitally.
“We’re not just interested in what students are learning intellectually, but also in their degree of engagement and self-efficacy, so when the going gets tough, they will have confidence in themselves and keep trying. In our virtual ecosystems, we want to help students believe that they, too, can be ecosystem scientists.”
“My students live and die by their phones. They ‘like’ somebody’s Snapchat and move on. It’s so temporary and removed,” he said. “So much of the technology our kids use removes empathy. But in this case, by placing kids in the moment, [VR] breaks that distance down.”
Another middle-school teacher who dropped his students into the virtual lives of refugees was Charles Herzog in Londonderry, Vermont, whose class tried VR last December near the end of a unit about forced migration. The Google Cardboard viewers that Herzog’s students used were bought by his partner in the project, the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education at the University of Vermont. According to Tarrant’s professional development coordinator, Rachel Mark, empathy education fits into Vermont’s required “Transferable Skills,” specifically “Responsible and Involved Citizenship,” which includes the ability to “demonstrate ethical behavior and the moral courage to sustain it.”
Mark’s blog post about teaching empathy mentions both the refugee VR video and one about the lives of police in Flint, Michigan. “In other forms of media, people may see conflicts as black and white,” she said. “By bringing in the perspective of human beings living through this, it might make you, as a fellow human being, reconsider the topic through someone else’s eyes.”
That’s the idea behind a new VR-based curriculum called “One World, Many Stories” by the nonprofit Global Nomads Group, which produced a series of 360-degree autobiographical videos from the perspective of a boy in eastern Kentucky, a young man in Amman, Jordan, and a young African-American woman in New York City.
Last fall, when Daniel Gross, a sixth-grade teacher in Los Altos, California, heard about “One World, Many Voices,” he jumped at the chance to pilot it. “We discuss current events on a weekly basis,” said Gross, “and inevitably that ends up with us talking about perspective-taking and empathizing with others.”
The four-minute dips into the lives of these young people are interwoven with paper-and-pencil class activities and discussions about the mix of individual and communal identities and the importance of perspective. A post-VR worksheet, for instance, asks students what preconceived ideas they had about the people in each video that were either bolstered or changed after being immersed in their worlds. Finally, students storyboard the scenes that they would include in their own 360-degree videos.
“So much of the technology our kids use removes empathy. But in this case, by placing kids in the moment, [VR] breaks that distance down.”
“We have always used technology to help connect young people who would otherwise not have a way to connect, to promote global awareness, curiosity and critical thinking,” said Abigail Finck, the marketing manager for Global Nomads. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has fostered discussions between young people from different cultures via webcasts, and one of these—a 2015 exchange between teenagers in South Los Angeles and Syrian refugees living in Amman, Jordan—first showed the potential of VR to further Global Nomad’s mission. Before the two groups met online, the kids from Los Angeles visited the lab of VR pioneer Nonny de la Peña to walk a mile through a simulation of war-torn Aleppo, Syria.
When the students finally did sit for their web chat, along with translators, the two groups of young people soon felt comfortable enough with each other that the discussion moved from the violence afflicting Syria to the “food deserts” of the inner-city neighborhood where the Los Angeles students lived.
“The refugees asked, ‘Why don’t you have a garden?’ ” Finck recalled. “ ‘We don’t have a home, but of course we have a garden, because that’s how we survive.’ ” Soon after, the students from Los Angeles started a community garden at their school.
In addition to sparking connections with others, there is evidence to suggest that embodying a VR avatar can change a student’s self-perception as well.
“I believe that immersion is very important and powerful, which is why I started working in it 25 years ago,” said Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who is editing a book about VR and learning. “But VR isn’t magic. It’s a very specialized tool.”
Dede’s research focuses on both VR and less-immersive augmented reality (AR) for science learning. On the fully immersive end of the spectrum, Dede and his team created a VR science game called ecoMUVE, in which students are immersed in a pond or forest ecosystem where they have to solve the mystery of a species collapse. Studies of ecoMUVE indicate that spending time working as a scientist in a virtual world may bolster a student’s confidence in her ability to be a scientist in the real world.
“We’re not just interested in what students are learning intellectually, but also in their degree of engagement and self-efficacy, so when the going gets tough, they will have confidence in themselves and keep trying,” said Dede. “In our virtual ecosystems, we want to help students believe that they, too, can be ecosystem scientists.”
*Correction: An earlier version of this column incorrectly attributed studies about avatars and reduced racial bias to Jeremy Bailenson’s lab.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter to get a weekly update on blended learning.
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