"Ugly in a world where you can choose to be beautiful": Teaching and learning about diversity via virtual worlds

In this paper, we discuss an approach to providing students with first-hand learning experiences that help them understand cultural differences and aspects of diversity. As part of a five-week course, fourteen high school students participated in activities within massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) as learning environments to explore issues of identity construction, discrimination, and cultural sensitivity. Student attitudes towards diversity and towards the technology used in the course are discussed. The students reported using the tool to explore and to equalize cultural and demographic differences. They showed significant improvement on a measure of sensitivity towards an understanding of diversity, and evidence suggests they were able to develop a more sophisticated, less essentialist model of diversity.