We live in an increasingly globalized world. Many of our children are growing up exposed to greater diversity than ever before, through direct contact with people around them, as well as via the various media channels with which they interact daily. While many inner-city schools across the UK boast over 30 different languages spoken by their students, making daily life a rich tapestry of experience, culture, religion and language, our world in general, and Britain’s Brexit agenda in particular, seems to reflect a society that is increasingly polarised, affected by ‘popularist’ messages of intolerance, suspicion and stereotyping. It seems it is not enough to live side by side. We need to engage compassionately with the human experience of our fellow citizens. We need to build a future together which includes as much diversity of experience and thought as possible to be able to find creative and humane solutions to the problems in the world.
Three years into its journey as a leading curriculum resource, using the simple power of human stories contained within its sophisticated and fascinating immersive story worlds, Lyfta has been paving the way for schools to tackle complex, challenging concepts around culture and identity in a powerful and inspiring way. Teachers are able to use the Lyfta platform to take children to real homes, workplaces and environments around the world that have been created into 360-degree explorable spaces. Children can click on things they see there and learn more about the places they visit. In each space, there is a person they can click on and ‘meet’, who comes to life in a short, 3-5 minute documentary.
We have worked with schools with great success to weave the Lyfta experience into their curriculum in myriad ways and to bring the human dimension to subject specific learning. However, one powerful experience many are choosing is to use the platform to start the conversation with students around their attitudes and biases towards culture and identity – their own, and that of others they may or may not know. One teacher in a school in Essex, near London, was concerned with the rising levels of nationalism in the area, and the attitudes of her students. The students at the school were all from white British heritage and had had little opportunity to experience living alongside people from diverse backgrounds or to explore the world beyond their local area. We developed an attitudinal survey which could be used with the students before and after their teacher used Lyfta with them to explore the world. As part of the survey, students were asked to consider 6 faces of people whom they would meet over the course of their exploration of the platform, and were asked: “which of these people do you feel you have most common ground with?”
6 Faces from the Lyfta platform
In the first survey, students said that they felt they had most in common with person 1,4 and 6. These are the people that look most like them in their experience. By the end of their time clicking around, exploring the different environments and watching a short documentary featuring each of the people in the pictures, they were asked to respond again to the question about common ground. Across the board, the students felt they had more in common with all of the people, and in particular, those that had scored lower in the first survey – person 2, 3, and 5. Most remarkable was the shift in affinity with one particular person. Person number 5, a 55-year-old Palestinian taxi driver who lives in Helsinki became their favorite person that they learned about. The children were keen to know if they might be able to meet him in real life one day.
Through this simple and powerful exercise, the teacher was able to start an important conversation with her students around difference, bias, diversity and more. She was able to provide them with an impactful and engaging experience, which will have a lasting effect. We know from research carried out by Immordino-Yang and Damasio in their 2007 study, We Feel Therefore We Learn, that when cognition and emotion come together, deep learning takes place. If we are to change hearts and minds, we cannot simply ‘teach and tell’ students about the world, or oblige them to understand the importance of human experience. Our commitment to bringing inspiring human stories to schools is intended to trigger a powerful and intrinsic motivational force in learners that will inspire them to take action to build a better world for us all. Our future is in their hands. Compassion could be the first item in their toolbox that they turn to.
Lyfta being used in the classroom