Inclusion Training Made Virtual
Meet the innovator who’s taken her life lessons on race and gender and turned them into an empathy-enhancing tool for teachers.
Meet Clorama Dorvilias
For CEO and founder of gaming lab DebiasVR, Clorama Dorvilias, her life’s calling came the day she decided to quit her master’s degree. Being the only woman of color in her course, she experienced emotionally taxing displays of discrimination from her teachers to the point of making her want to give it up.
But she didn’t quit. Instead, when her course professor assigned a master’s research thesis asking students to use technology to solve a problem of today, she applied herself to creating something that would help ensure students in the future would not have to face the same issues she did.
It was from here that Teacher’s Lens was born. It gives teachers the virtual reality environment, tools and data they need to experience, analyze and reverse their own internal bias, and create level playing field for all of their students.
“The most mind-blowing thing I learned while developing the project is that a teacher’s belief that a student can succeed is a higher indicator of success than a student’s home life, social group of friends, and even the teacher’s subject knowledge.”
Inclusion via Technology
The very same Arm-powered microprocessor that enables smart phones and traffic systems is used in the VR technology that powers Clorama’s goals for inclusion.
Teacher’s Lens is made up of evidence-based training simulations that teachers can do anywhere they have a VR headset and on an ongoing basis. It’s the first bias training that allows users to measure and track their progress over time and it employs evidence-based debiasing methods that are positive, engaging and informed by data.
For a while now VR has been setting itself up as a powerful classroom tool for the future, but it’s technology like this from innovators like Clorama that are set to change the learning experience and the lives of so many, and in the most real life of ways.