Digital Ethnography Paper: Learning to Care in S

Virtual Tools: Learning to Care about Difference in SecondLife Chelsey Hauge Ethnography and New Media  Professor Jason Pine Dec. 8, 2008

Virtual learning spaces and tools have potential to shift the pedagogical spaces in which transformative learning evolves. These new spaces force individuals to conceptualize and relate differently in a manner that at once incorporates both embodied experience and disembodied presence at the same time that virtual and real worlds converge.   As this happens, the way we sense the world morphs, mediated not only through the body and language but also through the machine used to access the virtual environment. The loops of understanding does not privaledge body, language, of the intelligent machine as it  This loop of understanding does not differentiate between body, language, and the intelligent machine (the computer), and forces reconsideration of the learning process. The extension of the loop of knowing and the convergence of virtual and real worlds in meaning making opens a pedagogical space in transformative education for learning about difference in a manner that is caring, compassionate, and empathetic.  This paper looks at the experiences of three young adults in the virtual world SecondLife as well as transformative educational theory and new media theory in order to conceive of how transformative education around issues of difference including race, gender, sexuality, and class can effectively use the tools of virtual environments in order to enrich the learning process.The young adults live together in New York City, hailing from South Carolina, California, and Mexico. There is a male in his late twenties who I will call S; and a woman in her early thirties who I will call K, and myself- I am a woman in my mid twenties. After introducing both participants to SecondLife, I toured them through a few of the sims I am familiar with, including dance parties, a French bar, a clothing store, and a music café. The participants went through guided experiences, such as changing the appearance of their avatars (digital representations of the self) and trying to make friends with someone new, or find a creative outlet. After the participation in SecondLife, we also engaged in discussion about the experience and its meaning. Participants wrote diaries after each experience, and then reflected together in a shared physical space about the experience. Diary entries and images from this experience can be found on my blog, http://chelseyhauge.wordpress.com. This is an example of how a research project in SecondLife might be done in the future, on a larger scale in order to consider how learning about and across difference can occur in SecondLife.
Education desperately needs to resolve the contradictions and inequalities that result in tension and inaccessible experiences for those adversely affected by power relations. We live in a world where youth urgently need to learn to overcome conflict of difference so that they can peacefully partner for radical sociocultural change. This might be done by structuring transformative educational experiences about difference to emphasize care, concern, love, celebration of difference and compassion. Nell Noddings, in her book “Learning to Care in Schools” suggests that if education was structured around circles of care, problems of difference and alienation would subside. This would occur because all students would engage in learning about how to care for themselves, intimate others, physical objects, distant others, nature, and ideas, among other topics. This would topple the hierarchy currently plaguing our education system that places a higher value on traditional liberal arts subjects like math and history. This value system privileges certain kinds of learning and interaction with knowledge, which is alienating to learners who have talents that are devalued. In addition to being alienating this system serves as a model to teach children and young people to reject difference and erect divisive barriers among which some people are defined as more capable and more intelligent. With Noddings’ idea, we move education beyond these barriers, transcending difference and celebrating unique talents. transition The most significant finding from this small pilot study is that SecondLife experiences are most powerful learning tools when used as a component of a larger educational plan. Individually, the three participants were able to play in SecondLife with characteristics of the body like height, size, color, and gender. We were also able to try out different ways of presenting ourselves without experiencing the consequences of embodied being that present real barriers in real life. The ability to experience difference like this relates the notion that embodiment of experience is not left behind in SecondLife, and nor does it replicate real life at a distance.  SecondLife and RealLife interact in ways that do not leave the body behind, but instead extend “embodied awareness in highly specific, local, and material ways that would be impossible without electronic prosthesis” (Hayles, 290). Media and literary scholar Katherine Hayles theorizes that it is impossible to conceive of consciousness- whether virtual or not- without embodied knowing and experience. She goes on to explain our interaction with virtual realities and smart machines like computers and mobile media technologies to be examples in which our loop of knowing extends beyond the body and language- knowing is also filtered and structured through the machine.
The participants struggled with the integration of their bodies and language with the computer and virtual reality. They found themselves at odds with the physical appearance of their avatars and the many ways they could re-create their avatars bodies, genders, and dress. This produced a tension between embodied experience and disembodied representation. The tension that was experienced  was not expressed during SecondLife but rather in post-SecondLife shared spaces. Intense discussion about identity, judgments, power, and relationships ensued. Hayles’ perception about processing the world through the body, language and computer manifested itself in our experiences in SecondLife. The manifestation created both tension and thoughtful reactions to the experience. This is the kind of fertile ground SecondLife can help to prepare for transformative education about difference.
When we use SecondLife as a tool in transformative learning, we are able to expose youth to important decisions and conversations about the politics of representation. Marika Lunders, in her article “Conceptualizing Personal Media,” argues one must be able to act as a cultural producer and engage with many others in order to participate in virtual communities. Through the productions of cultural artifacts participants are able to engage or understand the virtual world around them (Luders).  Additionally, multi-modal literacy is necessary in order to make sense of visual, sensory, and auditory information about avatars which represent bodies of other participants. Examples of ways in which SecondLife users engage through cultural production include the creation and maintenance of an avatar (the digital people who inhabit SecondLife and who are controlled by program users), dressing for parties, creating and hanging out in art in galleries, and interacting both through auditory speakers and visual written communication. SecondLife avatars often give gifts, have jobs, and attend parties. All of these activates require participation in culturally acceptable norms and require the user to produce cultural artifacts. The artifacts reflect both the physical life outside of SecondLife experienced by the user as well as the negotiation of multi-modal literacies, which generate particular meaning within SecondLife. This engagement with physical worlds, cultural artifacts, and multimodal literacy’s within SecondLife suggests that engagement with virtual worlds allows for learning to occur in and around the politics of representation and difference. This is an excellent space for youth to “play” with and experiment with the politics of representation. Of course, it requires caring and empathetic post-play/experimentation facilitation that fosters critical inquiry. This kind of environment and play might serve as a point of entry that is engaging for young people to then think critically about Otherness and difference.
The potentiality of role play in SecondLife provides an opportunity to experience reality newly, in a manner impossible without electronic prosthesis. Our experiences in SecondLife represent our own interaction and engagement with knowledge as produced by the body and our deep preoccupation and curiosity with what happens when we represent ourselves to others and that body– while still connected as part of the processing loop- becomes invisible to others. The invisibility of embodied knowledge releases a kind of play that might be less inhibited and release new sensations of being. Certainly, it allows young people to try on different skins, genders, clothing, and ways of presenting themselves. Fostering discussion post SecondLife on this fluidity of identity and representation can lead to education about the fluidity of difference, hopefully fostering care and curiosity about difference amongst the learners. Because of the lack of physical body appearance behind the avatar, an intense curiosity seems to manifest itself. The participants in this study all asked considerable questions about who the SecondLife users are in real life, mostly focused on what they look like but also ranging to include jobs, interests, and other topics. While experiences in SecondLife do indeed suggest an interaction of the computer with the body in order to build relationships with others and the world as Katherine Hayles has so clearly emphasized in her book, this machine-mediated experience needs to be paired with real interaction in order for it to become a transformative learning space for the participants. This was evidenced in journal comments about appearance and role play that emphasized physical characteristics and their relationship (or lack there of) to what, or who was behind the screen. The participants made many comments about their avatars not looking like themselves, trying to be someone else, and even about users “cheating” their identities through changing what they look like in SecondLife.
The high level of engagement with the physical does lead to a certain degree of curiosity that is powerful insofar as it moves participants to ask many questions of each other about the others life that are not guarded or shaped by assumptions made about physical appearance. However, these questions tend to stay in the physical realm, and the participants tend to ask each other questions and/or comment on how differently avatars and their “people” look, act or behave. Focusing on this difference between real and digital puts an emphasis on what we dream or aspire to be like physically, and could guide research about desires and dream states about the body and image. This does not, however,  facilitate transformative education unless it is coupled with other tools of empowerment. But when Second Life is coupled with real interaction and discussion about the above mentioned characteristics it can have the potential to fuel transformative education and critical consciousness. In the right setting, it serves as a play-space to explore questions about identity and relationships as they are linked to questions of power like race, sexuality, gender, geography, age, and other markers of power. However, without post-SecondLife experiences that are situated in a Frierian construct of education for critical consciousness, the experiences in the play-space bear no meaning in real life.
Initially, I considered that the question-asking and curiosity about how one is so different physically in real life than in SecondLife interpretations might hold potential for users and learners to effectively care about each other in new ways in the sense suggested by Noddings. However, it became apparent in this very small experiment that caring is more likely produced through the critical engagement in real space rather than in the SecondLife space alone. In order to foster this kind of empathy towards others at all, users first need to move beyond stereotypes and stigmas attached to users of virtual worlds.
SecondLife provides a very interesting platform for people to come together in one virtual space even as they are at great distances physically. For those of us interested in building critical consciousness and in activating young people to take a lead in international issues, SecondLife appears to hold endless potential. This virtual space does indeed hold potential for connecting youth globally. We must be careful, however, to construct learning in a way such that young people are able to engage both in SecondLife and in real life in supportive environments. These environments should be structured around Noddings circles of care. In designing a curriculum for youth educators that opens pedagogical spaces of critical consciousness and makes use of virtual worlds, we should consider creating “home groups” of learners who interact with other “home groups.” Home groups, in this vision, would be small groups of students working with a facilitator or educator to guide them in local contexts. These groups would engage in significant team building activities in order to build trust and community within the group. Home groups could then engage on SecondLife with other home groups from other states, cities, nations, and continents. This would require educators coming together globally to construct a series of themes about which the youth could engage. Likewise, youth playing a leadership role could select and help to guide home groups through the themes.
While youth would participate in virtual activities surrounding a variety of themes, they would process these experiences in their home groups. The home group leader would be responsible for creating a pedagogical space where issues of power, activism, and justice could be interrogated. Creating informed youth in this manner, and providing a supportive environment that networks with other supportive home groups is crucial. In this context we see the vision shared by many media theorists of a networked existence consisting of nodal points come into focus in terms of education and young people. Issues would be shared and learning exchanged through the network, each home group serving as a point of gathering for tiny nodes of interaction, and those tiny nodes would each make up a larger node in the network (Hayles, Shaviro).
The reality of ubiquitous computing in the lives of youth worldwide has potential to affect education tremendously. However, this shift needs to be carefully planned out in ways that are beyond our current educational system. While wide-scale change like that suggested by Noddings is possible in the digital world and in pockets of transformative learning that take place largely after-school and in the summer, the formal education system is largely unprepared such radical change. For this reason, progressive use of virtual worlds in education that focuses on empathy, care, concern, love, and hope in the world seems to exist and flourish in after school pockets and in small and very progressive private and charter schools. The existence of educators working in this mode is hopeful, however the movement is piecemeal, existing in islolated pockets and inside of small networks of communities scattered across the globe. It is a movement that finds its space outside of the canonical education system which Paolo Freire also chose to work outside of in order to be most effective. At this moment in time, it would be most effective for educators and theorists as well as youth learners to come together to begin to bridge the gaps in learning and access that still plague our youth. Digital worlds hold extreme potential for learning in new ways, for releasing questions and curiosity about difference, and for providing experiences to youth that they can then process in the real world in pursuit of critical consciousness and peaceful youth alliance building and leadership. Digital tools need not operate in isolation as educational systems or milieus, rather, they should be incorporated into transformative learning and used to excite a curiosity and wonder in young people. Digital environments have extreme potential to strengthen the transformative education movement and to spark a sense of curiosity, hope, and innovation in the lives of both young people and educators.

Works Cited

Clark, Andy. “A Sense of Presence”. Pragmatics and Cognition (2007): 413-433.   Hayles, Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  hooks, bell.1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, New York: Routeledge.  Luders, Marika. “Conceptualizing Personal Media” New Media and Society  (2008).   Noddings, Nel. 1992. The Challenge To Care in Schools. New York: Teacher’s College Press.   Shaviro, Steven. 2003. Connected, Or What it Means to Live in the Networked Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  Smith, Randall B. “Experiences with the Alternate Reality Kit: An Example of he Tension Between Literalism and Magic.” (1987): ACM-0-89791.

All work archived with participant diary entries and images at:  Hauge, Chelsey. http://chelseyhauge.wordpress.com/.

~ by chelseyhauge on December 14, 2008.