The World They Will Create
When you put students in Felix & Paul Studio’s Jurassic Park: Apatosaurus short, only good things happen. Today I had the privilege of watching 7th and 8th graders spend a few minutes watching the female apatosaurus wake up, eat, and return to her eggs and to her rest. And as they watched her, I watched them. Their excitement was infectious and their reactions worth recounting.
I hadn’t planned on having my 7th graders experience this new medium, not because I think VR isn’t educational—on the contrary, I think it can be very educational if the experience is designed carefully and executed well. However, my 7th graders’ group behavior is mercurial at best, even in May, and to be fully immersed the viewer needs to know that she is safe. However, after witnessing the reaction one of my lunch regulars had to the experience, I knew I was going to try to share it with her classmates.
You see, the moment this quiet student put on my VR headset, her smile broke open and her wonderment was palpable. She was standing in an underfunded classroom, but she was seeing Base Camp in the Himalayas – snow beneath her feet, Orion perching on the peaks before her and Ursa Major ladling the mountains behind. Then she entered Jurassic Park and an “Oh, my!” escaped her as she asked, “Is it dead?” “No, just sleeping.”
As she watched it wake and stretch, curiously eye her and stand, Janae (not her real name) lost herself to the forest and the dinosaur before her. She gazed around her campsite, trembled as the gentle giant first noticed her, ducked as its tail swung near. And when she stepped back into the classroom, she was changed.
As her teacher, I’m happy she enjoyed the journey, however brief, in this other land. As an academic, I wonder about its impact on her: Will she approach technology differently? Will she ponder the possibilities of VR as she continues to learn? Will her memory of the experience continue to pull at her so that she pursues a career that allows her to create it? And, most importantly in my mind, will she naturally transfer that attentiveness, that wide-awakeness she had in the experience to her every day?
That, for me, is the potential power of this medium: the ability to lead students toward wide-awakeness. At the start of my career, I could lead them there with stories of authors and their books: We became Hemingway’s code hero and pulled against ourselves from a skiff in the sea; we took Boo’s hand and tugged him towards our brother; and we will come back for the others, just as the three sisters said. At the end of my time in teaching, that path to shaking my students wide-awake, was more difficult—I was competing with social media and its images and its likes and its shares, and I was losing. I don’t like losing. I want to win.
I want to win so students can be pushed to ask themselves the big questions that Joyce Carol Oates set out in her tale, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” What is your purpose? It is this, the finding of purpose, what creates meaning in life. As educators, in addition to teaching students content necessary for citizenship in society, we are responsible for providing students with experiences that help them grow into their best selves, that teach them to be wide-awake to the possibilities within themselves, that guide them to ponder the questions that great literature demands we ponder.
My hope is that through crafting introductions to great authors and historic events in cinematic virtual reality, by creating suggested ways for integrating it into the classroom, and by teaching English and history teachers the technology that powers it, that the students they teach will want to learn more about the authors or the history, will pay closer attention to the words of the writers, and will embrace and create in this new medium. What wonders they will create, what a world they will craft.