"Visualising Affect Using Virtual Reality"

About the Authors

Polly Card is Senior Video Producer at San Diego State University. She is currently working towards a Ph.D in Education with SDSU/CGU focusing on visual research, race and gender. Pollycard.com

Michelle Ruiz is an instructional designer at the University of California Berkeley. Currently, she is focused on the UC-Mexico Initiative: she designs binational  online courses with faculty from University of California and the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her research interests include issues of equity and binational collaboration in online higher education. Her personal website can be found at mixelle.net.

Contents

Introduction

Context

Positionality & Rationale

Experiencing the World From A New Perspective

The Film

The Film Cont.

Works Cited

The Film, Cont.   

For instance, during all the scenes of the film, the ICM identifies potential environmental pressures. The early morning scene features an elderly family member preparing breakfast and represents the student's commitment to family. From our interviews, we learned that family was an important factor for students with commitments, often pulling time away from focus on their college work.

The scene that is depicted in Figure 5 shows Tijuana at 5 a.m. in the San Diego/Tijuana border area and represents the early start students make when they commute across the border to attend college in the United States. Students begin their daily journeys early in the morning, given the time they need to spend travelling. Transportation was consistently identified by the students interviewed as a barrier, with public transport reportedly being unreliable. 45% of Latino men spend at least six hours or more a week commuting to and from campus, compared to 33% of white men (NPSAS, 2012).

Related to this is the border-crossing scene depicted in Figure 6, which explores the added layer of complexity, stress, and potential hazard of the commute. Crossing times and border events are unpredictable for studentsl; the border is a place of harassment and overt discrimination. As one interviewee put it, “everyday it is nerve wracking. You never really get used to it.”

Figure 6: Pedestrian border scene and Socio-Political domain icon

Figure 7: Shopping Center scene and Emotional Affect icon

The scene at the shopping center, depicted in Figure 7, is representative of the nature of students' employment. This is based on an interview with a student who said “I pushed carts at K-Mart for years to fund my education and support my family.”

Student responses aligned with Harris and Wood's (2016) work with the Community College Survey of Men (CCSM), an instrument designed to examine predictors of student success for men in community colleges. Our research suggests that there are often pressures on TELLM students to be breadwinners and that much of the work undertaken by men of color attending community college is physically demanding, temporary, low pay, and transient in nature (Wood, 2013). The film also demonstrates how institutions play a key role in shaping the success of students. In particular, all of the students we interviewed shared that they considered their relationships with their teachers to be important and influential. We chose to film inside a classroom to help educators reflect on the role of teachers and institutions. Both positive and negative experiences with teachers were noted to have a huge affect on students. Some students felt that teachers had low expectations of them and held negative stereotypes about them based on their race and gender identity.

One student told us that he had a teacher like the one from Dead Poets Society, who cared about them beyond the classroom, taking them for coffee outside of class and encouraging them to apply for scholarships. This is a great example of Espinoza’s (2011) pivotal moments, where teachers take the initiative to reach out to students and provide concrete academic guidance or interventions that often point the way towards student success. These findings echo Alfaro and Bartolomé's (in press) notion of "authentic carino," where trust, mutual respect, and authentic care play a big part in engaging students to succeed at college.

We shared the film with 20 teachers, staff, and administrators ranging from middle school to community college experts attending the Dual Language and English Learner Conference in San Diego in 2017. Due to the nature of the conference, these educators had a vested interest in the film's topic. Feedback from this initial screening suggested that it had a positive impact on participants. Participants found they had a stronger sense of their own ideological clarity as a result of the immersive experience. After the visual experiment, participants were asked to reflect on their experience and an active discussion took place among participants before completing a questionnaire. They reported to have greater empathy for students and said it was "emotionally, visually, and intellectually engaging."

A number of teachers gave feedback that they appreciated how they could "live it" alongside their students and that the technology enabled them to feel as if they had been "put into someone else’s skin." Another teacher noted, "Having walked in their shoes, so to speak, I feel more likely to give [TTFM students] the benefit of the doubt. No wonder they show up late and tired . . ." When asked about the impact that this experience may have on their teaching practice, one teacher said "It makes me think of how I could tailor my teaching to suit their needs better. . . I could create homework that they can access on their phones while they wait at the border perhaps . . ."

We hoped the film would transform practice and a number of teachers suggested that they would make more of an effort to engage students on a personal level, in and outside of the classroom in order to understand their experiences. As with Garcia’s understanding of language, we consider learning to be a "dynamic communicative practice" (p. 54). Having tested out the ICM pilot, we shall develop the project as a tool for teacher and administration self-assessment and supplement professional development. The film will help teachers empower themselves to better educate and serve all students, to look at learning from a new perspective, and understand their students, given their realities, in an authentic way. The ICM will assist administrators in becoming more ideologically clear, serving as a compelling example to respond with strategies that benefit TELLM students, such as hiring teachers that represent and advocate for the students they serve, and include student experience in their curricula. Given the findings of this study, possible next steps include having the ICM explore other student experiences, to enable a breadth and depth of professional development to teachers, and expanding the research to include pre- and post-test surveys conducted to assess the ICM’s impact.

Polly Card is currently producing a documentary on men of color’s experiences at community college. For more information please see tidepools.org.