"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

Positionality & Rationale

Positionality

Ruiz, an e-learning designer, and Card, a producer who creates visual media for education, recognize the affordances of video as a powerful tool for transformative learning. We believe that the film has the potential to help instructors understand a greater depth of the systems that perpetuate student deficit models, cultural, and linguistic subordination for transborder students. Through the ICM, we hope to galvanize instructors to resist and transform oppressive practices in educational institutions.

The ICM builds on Card’s previous work, The Blush Machine, a visual research piece, produced at Kiosko Boliva gallery in 2013. The event explored race and gender, and engaged participants through visual texts. The ICM deals with similar topics and also extends Ruiz’s Entry Denied, an interactive multimedia installation exhibited at UC San Diego Annex Gallery in 2013. Both researchers develop media from an academic standpoint; visuals, stories, navigations, aesthetics are all elements informed by conceptual frameworks and research findings.

Rationale

Alfaro et al. (2015) examined teacher preparation and ideology and found that all prospective teachers, regardless of their ethnic background, often have beliefs and attitudes about the existing social order that reflect potentially harmful dominant ideologies, and that they do so unconsciously and uncritically (Alfaro, et al., 2015). Educators are encouraged to engage in the juxtaposition of counterhegemonic narratives firstly, to identify racist ideologies and deficit views, and to address them. Alfaro’s (2016) work on "ideological clarity" reports that if educators embrace an objective and sociolinguistic understanding of English Language Learners (ELL) skills and knowledge, then they can help students build on their language skills and achieve in school. Alfaro (2016) calls on educators to intervene proactively to prevent potential discriminatory manifestation of deficit ideologies by a process of identifying, naming, and confronting them. The ICM, encourages the process of "ideological clarity" and highlights areas for participants to examine within the world of the film. 

The ICM was produced to elicit greater empathy and commitment to supporting the success of men of color in community college. The ICM provides an opportunity to reflect on the systems that perpetuate student deficit models and linguistic subordination with the potential for transformative learning. Darder et al’s (2003) research suggests that the study of ideology can help educators critically evaluate their practices and recognize how dominant class culture becomes embedded in the curriculum. By reproducing hegemonic culture, students are silenced and democratic education is hindered. To resist oppressive practices, Darder recommends that educators gain a firm understanding of dominant ideologies and develop effective tools to transform counterhegemonic discourse. The ICM is designed to expose dominant ideologies and challenge implicit attitudes of audiences bias towards transborder students.

Alfaro and Darder’s research along with Freire’s (1993) pedagogy on the development of critical consciousness informed our decisions when producing the film. Freire writes that the development of critical consciousness involves educators experiencing a process of insight, thought, and action to become critical thinkers. The process involves an “active, dialogical educational program” (Freire, 1993, p. 19) where educators generate scenarios of alternative ways of being and challenge social relations. The graphics and sound effects overlaid on the film represent the "Ideological Machine." The Machine scans the environment creating a multimodal layer between reality and its interpretation. The ICM’s narrative juxtaposes myth and reality in an attempt to create disequilibrium in the status quo and raise pertinent questions for the participants regarding their own biased narratives of transborder students’ experiences. Bartolomé (2008) builds on this approach arguing that practicing “authentic cariño” (care) and incorporating students’ primary languages and cultural values into their school culture and curriculum can help ELL students to excel (Bartolomé, 2008). We also value Noddings (2013) approach that prioritizes concern for relationships; she argues that “caring involves stepping out of one’s own personal frame of reference into the other’s” (Noddings, 2013, p. 24). By immersing the participants into the 360 world of the transborder student we are positioning them in a space where they are asked to care about a transborder student’s frame of reference.