Doctoral candidate Jared Ten Brink speaks with the EdSurge podcast about how VR can help preserve and teach Indigenous culture
Across distance, 360 videos bring teachings of tribal elders to a broader audience.
The EdSurge podcast features a conversation with Marsal School doctoral candidate and enrolled member of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, Jared Ten Brink. Ten Brink lives a two-and-a-half hour drive from his tribe’s reservation, which has made it hard for him to teach his two young kids about their Native heritage. As a former science teacher and instructional coach, though, he was looking for a way to deliver the teachings of tribal elders to a broader audience via distance education.
When Ten Brink found Zoom to be too flat a platform to truly connect with the land, he began taking a 360-degree camera out in the field to capture key cultural practices. Now Ten Brink is developing a curriculum that uses short VR videos and hands-on exercises to teach indigenous ways of knowing to a broad population of students.
“I don't think it's ironic that technology helps us to learn in this space. Native people have utilized technology in a lot of different ways for a long time, and we're not stuck in one era or one past,” Ten Brink tells EdSurge.