Can Virtual Reality Teach Empathy? – Slate Magazine

Teacher William Parker and a 10th-grade student from Boyd County High School in Kentucky immerse themselves in One World, Many Stories: Amman, Jordan.

Global Nomads Group

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 to transport his class into this emergency food drop featured in the New York Times 360-degree video series about refugees. Count Letizia among VRs burgeoning fan base in education, where the spread of high-quality content and more affordable hardware (especially Googles $15 Cardboard viewer) give students myriad ways to briefly inhabit what theyre learningfrom wandering the streets of ancient Rome to touring the International Space Station.

So much of the technology our kids use removes empathy. [Virtual reality] breaks that distance down.

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 VRs 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 Universitys Virtual Human Interaction Lab, led by communications professor Jeremy Bailenson. In the labs Empathy at Scale studies, people who inhabit avatars of a different race in a virtual world later score lower in tests of subconscious racial bias, and young people who wear an elderly avatar are then more inclined to save for retirement. Charities, including the International Red Cross, have made VR films to counteract compassion fatigue and boost donations.

Empathy isnt a subject in most schools, and its 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.

My students live and die by their phones. They like somebodys Snapchat and move on. Its 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 in December near the end of a unit about forced migration. The Google Cardboard viewers that Herzogs students used were bought by his partner in the project, the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education at the University of Vermont. According to Tarrants professional development coordinator, Rachel Mark, empathy education fits into Vermonts required Transferable Skills, specifically Responsible and Involved Citizenship, which includes the ability to demonstrate ethical behavior and the moral courage to sustain it.

Marks 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 elses eyes.

Thats 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 black 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.

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 thesea 2015 exchange between teenagers in South Los Angeles and Syrian refugees living in Amman, Jordanfirst showed the potential of VR to further Global Nomads mission. Before the two groups met online, the kids from Los Angeles visited the lab of VR pioneer Nonny de la Pea to walk a mile through a simulation of war-torn Aleppo, Syria.

When the students finally did sit for their webchat, 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 dont you have a garden? Finck recalled. We dont have a home, but of course we have a garden, because thats 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 students 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 Universitys Graduate School of Education who is editing a book about VR and learning. But VR isnt magic. Its a very specialized tool.

Dedes research focuses on both VR and less-immersive augmented reality 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 students confidence in her ability to be a scientist in the real world.

Were 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.

This story was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Future Tense is a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate.

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Can Virtual Reality Teach Empathy? - Slate Magazine