Virtual Reality: Growing our empathy for other cultures

Over our summer, our director shared with us (me and four other colleagues) an online workshop called Leading Schools Interculturally. We, as leaders of the Intercultural Learning committee, thought this would be a serviceable way for us to take advantage of school closure and keep ourselves busy.

The objectives of the workshop were to:

• Understand the interplay between culture and leadership style.

• Build awareness of how other cultures view leadership.

• Assess how well our school is addressing global citizenship and start building an action plan.

For many-a-quarantined day and night, I stayed up scrolling through its extensive modules, leaving my feedback on discussion forms, and answering questions like:

In what ways can you and your school leaders adapt to other cultures and still maintain your own cultural identity? How can you as a leader address the multiple cultures that exist in international schools?

What I was interested to explore, however, was ways in which we can use creative and innovative storytelling techniques to think about the digital world from a cross-cultural perspective.

Experiences are what define us as humans, so it’s not surprising that an intense experience in virtual reality is more impactful than watching a Youtube video, or TED talk. 

One thing I noticed in my experience teaching at a private school in Kuwait, is that students tend to form clusters based on similarity, and then produce stereotypes about other clusters of people, or “the others”. There is one commonality amongst the students at the school. They all, generally speaking, live in and come from almost identical social and cultural circles. Even with the luxury of coming from high income households and the freedom to travel the world, most students and their families do in other countries what they would routinely do on weekends in Kuwait; shop at high-end stores, relax by the pool, dine lavishly, and people-watch at various market squares and plazas. There is a lack of cultural connection with the world and standards of living beyond the ones familiar. This means that students come back home after the summer to the same unaltered mirror images of themselves of which - I fear - can run the risk of their imagination shrinking and humanness withering. 

Here’s where I believe virtual reality might help. By either creating virtual reality experiences or incorporating them into our lesson plans, we, as facilitators, have the freedom and ability to help our students travel and explore the worlds’ endless diverse cultures around us, embrace the unfamiliar, and transcend these cultural stereotypes.

NCSU illustrates this wonderfully with their GlobalVR: Teaching Cultural Competencies Through Virtual Reality initiative, which allows students to learn about cultures on both a cognitive and emotional level. Their VR-mediated lesson allows participants to dive into the minds of a global project team, giving students a chance to experience things like the nuances of communication and conflict resolution from multicultural points of view.

“Virtual reality provides unique opportunities for training related to leadership and management in a safe and engaging environment. This VR mediated lesson uses the principles of action learning, including two specific elements of conflict resolution: self-awareness and empathy skills. Participants learn to respond appropriately and effectively to a cross-cultural incident in a business situation. This VR mediated activity is intended to be used as part of a course aimed at developing global management and leadership skills.”

The use of virtual reality and specifically 360° video provides a mechanism for immersing students in a different time and place. Students are not only learning that people from other cultures may think and behave differently, but they are also able to experience it for themselves.

I believe storytelling and simulation through immersive experiences and collaboration allows for students to leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, and feel what others feel to develop a longer-lasting compassion and understanding of cultures different than their own.

Through this, students can get a glimpse of “the other” and maybe — just maybe — like what they see.