Using Virtual Reality to Tackle Sustainable Development Goals in Language Classrooms

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Investigating how digital technologies shape understandings of citizenship and civic attitudes

Proposal

With the development of Virtual Reality(VR) technology and the increased accessibility of VR cardboard glasses, the potential of incorporating VR in education has been explored in diverse educational contexts. Previous researches on VR in classroom settings have shown evidences that VR may boost student motivation, empathy, and knowledge transfer as students’ response to virtual experiences tended to be similar to the response to actual experiences (Mantovani, 2001; Aubrey, Robb, Bailey, & Bailenson, 2018). The effect of VR with regards to some of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as reducing racial biases and inequality, has been explored in experimental settings. Peck, Seinfeld, Aglioti, & Slater (2013) investigated the behavioral pattern of individuals who embodied a black avatar in a virtual world, and concluded that VR reduced implicit racial biases. Another study conducted by Ahn, Le, and Bailenson (2013), demonstrated that VR experiences can arouse empathy for people with colorblindness. While these studies imply the potential of using VR in global citizenship education, no prior research explores students’ use of VR to tackle the SDGs in public education settings.
Therefore, this action research aims to explore students’ use of VR technology on global issues and its effect on empathy, English communication skills, and problem solving skills. The observation was conducted in two project-based English as a Foreign Language(EFL) classes in South Korea: (1) a middle school action plan presentation class on the SDGs (2) a high school social entrepreneurship class on refugee issue. The students’ project results were observed to investigate the effectiveness of using VR in global citizenship education in terms of improved understanding on given topics and development of empathy skills.
The middle school class was conducted over a span of 6 lessons, where students’ final product was to present their own version of UN’s “The Lazy Person’s Guide to Saving the World,” an action plan on one of the SDGs. The lesson objective was twofold: (1) to comprehend the news report on environmental issues presented in a VR form (2) to try out the solutions on real life problems related to the SDGs. First, the students were presented with the SDGs, and two NYT VR clips (China Slows Garbage Imports, A Toxic Part of Texas). Then, each group selected one of the SDGs to ideate the related problems and actions they would actually take to solve that problem. They took action for a week and reported it in their presentation. According to the student reflection, the students answered that they could comprehend the VR clips well even without the subtitles. Although the level of the language used in the VR clips were quite higher than the linguistic ability of the learners, the VR scene could have served as visual cues to contextualize the news report. In addition, when ideating the solutions on the SDGs, it was observed that students tended to brainstorm more ideas on SDGs they saw the VR clips about in comparison to the other topics, which could be a suggestion that VR contributed to problem solving. Based on this observation, we decided to conduct a similar project in a high school setting, this time only focusing SDG 16, “Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions,” which is a topic that students have little previous background knowledge on.
The high school social entrepreneurship project was conducted in 10 sessions with an aim of designing social enterprise to enhance life quality of refugees. The students were given three VR clips in the first three lessons provided by NY Times Magazine (The Displaced), UNHCR (Clouds over Sidra), and Toms (Virtual Giving Trip), the social enterprise. Afterwards, students read articles on the refugee issue, created infographics of refugee issues based on their research, learned about the constitutes of social enterprise, and finally designed their own social enterprise to help the life condition of refugee issue. The students’ project results showed that students immersed relatively deeper into the topic when they were given VR inputs; the students reflected on the problems they have observed in VR clips to solve in their final presentations. Examples of problems the students addressed and investigated in their projects were creation of farming toolkit for the barren refugee lands, creation of mobile advertise platform to raise fund and awareness on the refugee issue, development of mobile games for designing and building homes and facilities for the exploded villages, and publication of collaborative history textbook creation to reduce historical misunderstandings. These examples mirror students’ empathy toward the refugee issues they observed in the VR clips.
In sum when VR is incorporated into global citizenship education context, we were able to observe students’ improved understanding and empathy in global issues and problem-solution abilities applied in practice.

References

Ahn, S. J., Le, A. M. T., & Bailenson, J. (2013). The effect of embodied experiences on self-other merging, attitude and helping behavior. Media Psychology, 16, 7–38.

Aubrey, J. S., Robb, M. B., Bailey, J., & Bailenson, J. (2018). Virtual Reality 101: What You Need to Know About Kids and VR. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense.

Mantovani, F. (2001). 12 VR Learning: Potential and Challenges for the Use of 3D Environments in Education and Training. Towards cyberpsychology: Mind, cognition, and society in the Internet age, 2, 207-.

Peck, T. C., Seinfeld, S., Aglioti, S. M., & Slater, M. (2013). Putting yourself in the skin of a black avatar reduces implicit racial bias. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(3), 779–787.

Authors

• Eunhye(Grace) ko, University of San Francisco

• Soohyoung Joo, Seoul Seoil Middle School