Story of an immersive experience
Paula Nottingham University of London
What was the context/situation/challenge?
The context of my immersive experience is the three years I spent at Mosby Middle School (now renamed Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School) in Richmond, Virginia during the 1970’s. I was approximately eleven to thirteen year of age.
I attended state schools in Richmond, Virginia that in 1972 were required by the Federal Courts to ‘desegregate’ the Richmond city school system to ensure fair access by race. As a southern state, Virginia had resisted integrating the racial balance of it’s school system, a system that the hallmark case of Brown v. the Board of Education required. I do not like the terms, but in the American South at that time, the terms ‘white’ and ‘black’ were used for racial designation. My designation was ‘white’ and I was ‘middle’ middle class (the USA has a much bigger middle class that the UK). After desegregation, the first year I attended the neighbourhood primary that I had previously attended, the next year I attended a local traditionally ‘black’ school, from 6th grade until 8th grade. I was bussed to a more urban Middle school located on the other side of the city, and finally for high school I was once again in the local school.
What were the particular characteristics of the situation that engaged you in an immersive way?
Going to Mosby required that I become immersed in the African-American and urban culture as I never had before.By this time, many ‘whites’ had left the Richmond educational system, leaving very few to balance the ethniticity of the school; the school was mainly African American. Funnily enough, one person who continued to attend was my best friend, who was Japanese-American. Often, I was the only ‘white’ in the classroom. Many of my classmates came from socially disadvantaged households (the ‘whites’ were bussed but many of the others at the school attended from the nearby housing estates).Many of ‘black’ students had never attended school with ‘white’ students’; sometimes there was bullying, sometimes students would go out of their way to help by providing protection, advice, and friendship.
What forms of learning / personal development / change emerged from the situation?
To adapt to the school, I needed to take a crash course in understanding what it was like to be different. I wore an army coat and converse tennis shoes as an urban uniform. I listened to radio programmes and television that were popular to the African-American community, i.e. Soul Train; much of the vernacular and spoken word were different to me. I to alter the way I behaved: I learned to adopt an unprovocative demeanour and not look up into people’s eyes because this was seen as aggressive. I tried to find friends to advise me on protocol; several friends were half African-American and half Indian and were also considered different by their classmates. I hid out whenever possible, spending most of the lunch hours in the library.
I was essentially in a social learning situation. Being put in an alien environment, like my Mosby experience, compels individuals to adapt and change in a dramatic way. I am not the same person as I would have been had I gone to a suburban all ‘white’ school. This ‘change’ does not perhaps present itself in a physical sense. I left with the impression that race and culture are complex issues and narratives depend on who is telling the story. I also developed skills for embracing differences, and even today refer to these experiences when working in higher education, especially in London.
What words/concepts/feelings would you use to describe the immersive experience?
Consuming, intense, life changing, complex.An immersive learning experience can key into the survival instincts we all have, and my example might suggest that some sense of urgency is required for this to take effect. The call to become different needs to be compelling. However, for higher education, I imagine that a more successful immersive experience also requires that individuals need to be given more controlled frameworks within which to explore. It requires some sort of leadership before, during and after the events. The learner would benefit from having some sense about what they had achieved during the immersive experience, so feedback during the process is essential. Some of the cognitive changes may not necessarily present themselves as observable behavioural changes, some might. Finally, I think I can relate immersive experiences to what I am now studying, work-based learning that develops transdisciplinarity; both might allow Higher Education to engage with social learning situations and provide a wider range of learning discourses within the university setting.
What principles or lessons can be drawn from this story?
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