GI Faculty member Dr. Kristina Llewellyn (Social Development Studies) is the perfect example of a scholar who fits in naturally at the Games Institute (GI), despite being a self-professed “non-gamer” in her personal life. It took GI Executive Director, Dr. Neil Randall (English Language and Literature), some time to convince Kristina to join the GI, simply because she didn’t think she was familiar enough with games-specific research. However, Kristina quickly found that there was more to the GI, and games, than what she had previously thought.
Over time, Kristina discovered that the GI was more about using interactive and immersive technologies to “address research or community-driven problems, and not so much about ‘games’ themselves per se.” Kristina had seen digital and non-digital games used to both “great positive and negative effect” in the classroom and wanted to create an educational virtual reality (VR) experience “for a social justice-oriented project.” This is when “Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation: The Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children History Education Initiative” (DOHR) was conceived.
DOHR is a community-based partnership that supports education via a curriculum created to educate students about the harms of the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children (NSHCC). The NSHCC was a segregated institution for Black Nova Scotian children that opened in 1921 and closed in 1979. Child residents of the home were subjected to exploitation, abuse, and neglect. After its closure, the harms survivors had faced wouldn't be addressed until the publication of the Restorative Inquiry, a 17-year journey that had the government of Nova Scotia acknowledge the harms of NSHCC and how systemic and institutionalized racism continue to impact the lives of African Nova Scotians.
The DOHR curriculum uses a restorative justice framework to share survivors’ oral histories through a VR experience that allows students to walk through a digital representation of the NSHCC while listening to survivors recount what happened within the walls.
The origins of DOHR are not typical for an academic project; Kristina’s 11-year-old nephew, Owen, interviewed Tony Smith – one of the former residents of the NSHCC – for a school project. Tony thought that Owen’s questions were much more insightful than any he had ever received from a journalist in all his years of advocacy work. The interview was an “intergenerational, intercultural, conversation about the lived experience of racism” between Owen and Tony. Kristina wanted to find a way to offer that type of special perspective-altering conversation to other students.
The stories of the survivors of the NSHCC are inextricably tied to the “home” itself and so only a place-based oral history rooted in the physicality of the building would do justice to their experiences. Virtual reconstruction of NSHCC was especially important because the building no longer appears as it did during the 70 years children lived there. Therefore the DOHR curriculum is where “oral history and VR come to meet.”
Kristina knew, however, that the development of the VR experience must be undertaken by people who share her values and respect for the survivors and their stories. This led to the creation of an extraordinarily interdisciplinary team of the “right” people to help “mould and sculpt” the DOHR environments to create a sense of what the team came to call “relational presence” in VR.
How did DOHR begin?
The origins of DOHR are not typical for an academic project; Kristina’s 11-year-old nephew, Owen, interviewed Tony Smith – one of the former residents of the NSHCC – for a school project. Tony thought that Owen’s questions were much more insightful than any he had ever received from a journalist in all his years of advocacy work. The interview was an “intergenerational, intercultural, conversation about the lived experience of racism” between Owen and Tony. Kristina wanted to find a way to offer that type of special perspective-altering conversation to other students.
How was the DOHR VR experience created?
The stories of the survivors of the NSHCC are inextricably tied to the “home” itself and so only a place-based oral history rooted in the physicality of the building would do justice to their experiences. Virtual reconstruction of NSHCC was especially important because the building no longer appears as it did during the 70 years children lived there. Therefore the DOHR curriculum is where “oral history and VR come to meet.”
Kristina knew, however, that the development of the VR experience must be undertaken by people who share her values and respect for the survivors and their stories. This led to the creation of an extraordinarily interdisciplinary team of the “right” people to help “mould and sculpt” the DOHR environments to create a sense of what the team came to call “relational presence” in VR.
Gerry Morrison, a former resident of the school, uses a VR headset. [Source: The Canadian Press]
Creating Careful and Ethical VR
The DOHR VR experience features the stories of Gerry Morrison, Tony Smith, and Tracey Dorrington-Skinner – the– heads of the advocacy organization Victims of Institutional Child Exploitation Society (VOICES) and part of the Restorative Inquiry. These former residents recount their experiences from within the virtually reconstructed learning environment.
The learners join the survivors on their “journey to light”: to bring their silenced stories to light to address past harms and create a more equitable future. When implemented as part of the more extensive history curriculum, students are asked to be active witnesses to what they have heard and finish the inquiry by engaging together in restorative actions. The full DOHR curriculum has now been piloted in Nova Scotia schools for testing.
Interdisciplinarity at the GI
Kristina explains that creating something like the DOHR VR experience “would not be possible without the Games Institute” because it required researchers from different fields with similar values to be able to find each other and collaborate. She sees the GI as a place where technology is seen less as a tool and more as “a medium through which our similar commitments to the common good can be fulfilled.” Most notably, in this sort of interdisciplinary collaboration, “it’s not games and technology driving the purpose. It’s the purpose driving how we engage with games and technology.
These values are especially important when the DOHR project has moved into its next phase, which involves incorporating haptic storytelling, i.e., tactile touch-based feedback, into the existing experience. The DOHR team is now working with the Haptics Experience Lab (HX Lab), led by Dr. Oliver Schneider (Management Sciences) at the GI to explore ways of incorporating haptics into the DOHR VR experience—a complex task as the team did not want to use haptics to recreate feelings of harm. Kristina explains that “it’s a test to see if it works” to explore other ways we can engage the senses in an experience that is not just visual and audio to create a more meaningful, engaging, and accessible experience.
In thinking back on her work experience with Oliver throughout this project, Kristina has said, “You are working with a scholar who has this industry-rooted experience, who wants to apply it to a community (…). Oliver is so careful and thoughtful, and that’s my experience with every single scholar at the GI, and that is why I feel that the GI is a fit for my work.”
Kristina is a rock star! I’ve learned so much from working with her, and always appreciate her ability to both explain how things work on the Arts side and rapidly adapt to how STEM researchers structure their work. […] it’s only because of our shared home in the GI that this kind of work is possible.
Left to right: Drs. Mark Hancock, Kristina Llewellyn, and Neil Randall, wearing and holding VR headsets at the GI. Source: The Record]
Collaboration at the GI
Kristina recounts a story of a visitor from another university who was shocked by the interdisciplinarity of the project. He was not convinced that it was possible to get computer scientists, engineers, legal scholars, education experts, theatre scholars, artists, teachers, community activists etc. to all work together on a project when they all have such different motivations and expectations to fulfil within their careers and lives.
Kristina replied that – while a challenge – the key is that “everyone on the team had to put aside their egos” because “academia is the worst for letting competition drive our decisions (…) because we’re building CVs and we’re asked to compete for grants and awards.” Kristina adds “DOHR has really highlighted for me how important that diverse community expertise is for any project to be done ethically and in ways that will actually have an impact.”
Through VR development, audio/video recording, 3D modelling and 2D art, theatre performance, oral history, game design, curriculum development, restorative justice, haptic storytelling, pedagogy, archival work, and thoughtful collaboration, DOHR is the perfect project to exemplify the functioning, productive, and respectful interdisciplinarity collaborations the GI fosters.
We’ve had opportunities to bring the former residents' stories everywhere, from international art exhibitions to digital humanities and HCI conferences to pedagogical journals, and we’re very excited to see the permanent VR exhibition installed at the Black Cultural Centre.