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“Walk a Mile in My Shoes”: A Virtual World Exercise for Fostering Students’ Subjective Understandings of the Experiences of People of Color

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Serious Games and Edutainment Applications

Abstract

In the virtual immersion project (VIP), students in the author’s Cross-Cultural Psychology class spend 2 h interacting in the virtual world, Second Life (SL), while piloting an avatar of a different racial background from their own. A qualitative coding of students’ (N = 16) reflection papers related to the VIP suggest that the project facilitated students’ complex understandings of race and racism, both affectively and intellectually. For example, some White students described feelings related to experiencing racial microaggressions while piloting avatars of color and related these experiences to their developing understanding of the concepts of race and their own White privilege in real life. Some students resisted seeing the role of race in their interactions. These findings are discussed in relation to the potential for the VIP to facilitate social justice educators in meeting the goals of transformative education pedagogy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We reserve the use of the word “racism” for discriminatory interactions perpetrated by Whites against people of color. The term “prejudice” is used when describing discriminatory interactions perpetrated by people of color against other people of color. Racism can only be perpetrated by a group that is in a position of sociopolitical power, such as Whites (Pinderhughes, 1989).

  2. 2.

    The avatars used in this project are also potentially available for educators to “borrow” for their own students’ use for completion of the VIP or related projects. Interested educators should send a brief proposal of their planned use of the avatars to the author. Requests will be considered on an individual basis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Salve Regina University, 100 Ochre Court Ave, Newport, RI, 02840, USA

    John Tawa

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  1. John Tawa
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Correspondence to John Tawa .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, United Kingdom

    Minhua Ma

  2. College of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Andreas Oikonomou

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Tawa, J. (2017). “Walk a Mile in My Shoes”: A Virtual World Exercise for Fostering Students’ Subjective Understandings of the Experiences of People of Color. In: Ma, M., Oikonomou, A. (eds) Serious Games and Edutainment Applications . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51645-5_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51645-5_17

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