Motivation
This project was motivated by witnessing the persistent individual and institutional bias in Aotearoa’s education system. This bias is embedded in teacher beliefs and behaviours, and results in teachers typically having lower expectations for Māori students and more harshly judging the academic performance of Māori compared with Pākehā students. This bias – whether recognised or implicit – translates into teacher behaviours that negatively impact Māori students’ learning. While our team has conducted studies in the past that have documented this bias, we felt it was time to attempt to address the bias.
Challenges
Addressing bias in education is challenging. Teachers are increasingly asked to do more, and generally with fewer resources. Current approaches to anti-bias training for teachers typically entail passive learning with limited result.
Vision
Early research suggests that Virtual Reality (VR) is potentially a powerful anti-bias tool. Our interest in VR as an “empathy machine” led us to this project, in which we are developing, implementing, and evaluating an anti-bias training that includes a cutting-edge VR experience where teachers ‘embody’ a Māori student facing bias across multiple daily situations.
What is Virtual Reality?
Virtual Reality (VR) utilizes digital headsets to fully immerse participants in virtual worlds. In VR, participants can turn in any direction and see, hear, and interact with the events surrounding them, creating a feeling that they are taking part in the event. With rapid technological advances, VR has become an inexpensive and viable learning tool in many fields. Its ability to immerse participants into different worlds and embody other personas has given rise to a new avenue of anti-bias research.
Some studies use VR to enable participants to have contact with avatars of different skin tones or ethnic attributes. A few intervention studies exist aimed at combatting bias. These studies have experimented with embodiment experiences in which participants take on the ‘body’ of an avatar to enable perspective-taking. Participants can see and move ‘their body’, for example, see their arms move, see their legs, or come across their ‘own’ reflection in a mirror. In one study, participants also heard the character’s inner monologue, gaining insights into how the events affected them emotionally. These embodiment experiences are aimed at encouraging users to empathize with the victim of bias and become motivated to reduce bias and biased behaviour.
These early studies show some promising results: the VR embodiment experiences promote mental merging, where participants take on characteristics of their avatar for a time, feelings that can carry over into the real world by increasing empathy. The latest research stresses that the design and use of VR experiences are crucial to obtain positive effects. First, if the avatar is merely an avatar of a white persona with darkened skin colour, a stereotyped avatar, or an avatar that lacks a real context or persona, biases again seemed perpetuated. VR experiences in which the avatar has a name and history, and offers views into their experiences of prejudice, have shown more positive results in reducing bias. Another important aspect is the visual quality and the interactivity level for the user in the experience. Technical glitches or VR environments that seem unnatural (e.g., clunky avatar body movements) can distract the participants and create a barrier to the feeling of embodiment. Our project uses these lessons learned from prior research in the development of our VR scenario.