Isle de Jean Charles

Deep in the bayous of Louisiana lies Isle de Jean Charles, home to the tribe of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation, made up of the tribes of the Biloxi, Chitimacha, and Choctaw, since the early 1800s. The Chitimacha, who originated in Louisiana, had been forced farther south after their long battle with the French. The Biloxi and Choctaw were forced from Mississippi to Louisiana to escape enslavement, and also because of the intrusion of white settlers and mandated ceding of land. In the early 1800s, the three tribes were distinct and had kept much of their culture intact by isolating themselves from European contact, even if it meant ceding their land. They were seen as “invisible people,” those who kept to themselves to avoid contact with whites. As the remnants of the tribes of the Biloxi, Chitimacha, and Choctaw resettled in Terrebonne Parish, their land encompassed 22,000 acres (about half the size of Washington, DC). After their initial displacements, the tribe suffered loss of land again when oil companies dug more than 10,000 miles of canals straight through the wetlands and brought oil rigs to Isle de Jean Charles. Promised repair of wetlands never happened. Isle de Jean Charles has now been reduced to only 320 acres (which is about five and a half times the size of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC), and, in some places, is only a quarter of a mile wide. The impact of global climate change and rising sea levels is yet another threat to this population as the images below illustrate (Figs. 1, 2, and 3).

Figs. 1, 2, 3
Three photos of the impact of rising sea levels. The first and second are aerial views of Isle de Jean Charles. The third is a landscape of the jungle that has a tree with no leaves.figure 1

The impact of rising sea levels on Isle de Jean Charles (Source: Heather N. Stone)

Full size image

American Indians have long been an under-represented, almost invisible community to many in the U.S., and the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation is no exception. By using oral history as a method, I have learned and discovered through first-hand accounts of those who have experienced the loss of not only their ancestral land but also their way of life. I also learned of their resilience as they have been forced to adapt their way of life. As Jean Charles Choctaw Nation tribal member Edison Dardar said, “it’s [the Island] maybe not much for some people, but for us, it’s plenty.” Their stories of numerous displacements, which the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation generously shared with me, foreshadow the fate of coastal populations worldwide if the environmental changes wrought by climate change are not addressed.

As an oral historian, I was intrigued by the stories of the people. As an educator, I wanted to teach others by documenting the residents’ voices using their history of place and ancestry and experiences of displacement due to the dramatic loss of land brought on by the destruction of wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico. The tribe has had to continually adapt its lifestyle due to the changes in Louisiana’s coastline over the last seventy-five years.

As a citizen of Louisiana, I am working with the tribe to share their history of displacement. As a professor of pre-service teachers, I see the need to integrate my work into my teaching, so future teachers can share this knowledge with their classes. The path I have taken to achieve the integration is by using virtual reality (VR). By creating virtual reality lessons through 360-degree videos of oral histories with tribal members and modeling land loss in an immersive experience, learning becomes engaging for students. The data collected from initial studies show students who learn about erosion and land loss through the VR experience have a better appreciation for how these abstract scientific terms affect real people.

The class I developed benefited from lessons learned in the Virtual Reality Ecoliteracy Curriculum (VREC) pilot that was created using Unity3D and tested with middle school students in eighth-grade classrooms in Lafayette, Louisiana. That pilot came about because educators believed that Louisiana’s students and citizens, who are on the front lines of land loss, need a deeper understanding of their coastal environment. The VREC pilot supported a scientific and technology-centered perspective of ecological issues, and its place-based education model connected students to the environment in which they live.

As students are exposed to nature, they gain connections to the environment, leading to a sense of belonging to the natural world. This, in turn, promotes positive attitudes and behavior that foster sustainable decisions about the environment and its displaced peoples. Undergraduate and K-12 classrooms can promote responsible environmental actions and further sustainability by encouraging students to explore and engage with environmental issues that teach science fundamentals and help students develop critical thinking skills.

Over the past six years, I have developed, implemented, and refined environmental lessons in a virtual reality experience. Then, I tested it with over one hundred middle school students in eighth-grade classrooms in Lafayette, Louisiana. These lessons were framed to explore the theory of place within a VR environment, informing the design of future educational lessons. Since an analysis of a critical pedagogy of place creates producers rather than consumers of knowledge,Footnote 1 my objectives were to discover if these lessons would facilitate a change in learners’ (a) environmental knowledge, (b) engagement, and (c) understanding of how affected communities construct a more significant awareness of environmental change.

Feedback and assessment after the pilot revealed that the students gained a unique perspective on the abstract global problem of climate change, which was made concrete by the VREC pilot examining local ecological changes. Middle school students who learn about erosion and land loss through the VR experience better appreciate the effects these abstract scientific terms have on real people.

After gaining permission and support from Chief Albert Naquin, we worked together to tell the story of his tribe and its resilience, through interviews I conducted with tribal members who recounted the stories of their community. In one interview, when asked about how the Island had changed, Jean Charles Choctaw Nation tribal member, Maryline Naquin, shared, “It’s changed quite a bit in my lifetime because we did have a lot more land and there was cattle when I was growing up, and we had a lot of fruit trees and pecan trees, which there are no more. And lots of gardens. People made all their own vegetables and things like that. And they could just go out and fish for what they wanted, shrimp and crabs and oysters. They could just go out and get what they needed for the day.” Maryline depicts the life of a self-sustaining community that no longer exists. The tribe can no longer live off the land as they once did. Only by collecting such oral histories does a deeper, more complex historical knowledge exist.

In another interview, Jean Charles Choctaw Nation tribal member Chantel Comardelle shared her memories of visiting the Island to see her grandparents, “It was adventurous; it was just a place like no other. I mean you’d drive onto the Island, and it’s like you’d drive into somewhere that’s totally different, the world stops, you don’t know that there’s wars and that there’s so much social unrest around us. But sadly, its spirit is changing.” Chantel’s reminiscence demonstrates her spiritual connection to the island, but also her sense of loss as the safe haven she knew as a child and grew up visiting was no longer the same.

I conducted the interviews on the Island with a 360-degree video camera in order to immerse students in what the narrators were saying and what they could see on the Island. Through the VR lessons, middle-school students were to construct knowledge of the Island and make meaningful connections. The students’ connections led to the following comments:

  • I learned that it is important to listen to what other people have been through. I like that it felt that I was in the conversation with them.

  • It was an interesting experience. It made me get a better understanding of the concept of land loss and how people and animals react to it.

  • I really liked the VR experience. It really helped me understand more because it felt like I was there in the moment. It kind of felt almost like they were talking to me. I would definitely want to learn like this in the future.

These comments illustrate the unique perspective middle-school students gained when learning about the abstract global problem of environmental issues leading to displacement, emphasizing the examination of local ecological changes. To quantify our research, a control group of students taught with a PowerPoint (PPT) learned the same content as the VR group. There was a positive gain for both the VR and PPT groups. However, the VR group was shown to have gained a higher understanding than the PPT group. Through the lesson creation, I gained insight into ways the VR experience can be expanded to include the development, design, and implementation by undergraduate students in different colleges across the university.

Course Creation

Emboldened by the experiences in the VREC pilot, I was determined to create virtual reality lessons with 360-degree videos of oral histories of tribal members to describe in their own words how land loss has impacted their lives. In order for this project to work, it would have to be inter- and transdisciplinary. At my own institution, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, I planned to bring together faculty and students from the College of Education and Human Development (Department of Curriculum and Instruction), the College of Liberal Arts (Department of History), and the College of Engineering (Department of Computer Science). Implementation would also involve students as researchers and participants. Because of Covid-19, all preparation for this course halted, but I present it here as a model of how new technologies can be used to deepen students’ engagement with, and understanding of, rising sea levels and displacement affecting their own communities.

For the course I developed to be implemented (discussed in more detail below), professors and undergraduates in Curriculum and Instruction, History, and Computer Science at my university will bring their unique expertise and methodology to further enrich our understanding of forced displacement. In that manner, the course will straddle the Humanities and STEM fields so that future teachers, historians, and engineers can work together to create VR lesson plans that highlight concrete action to address challenges of displacement.

The course sketched below addresses the Now What? question that this collection of essays asks, often echoed by our undergraduates. The class also responds to the call of our students for more prescriptive rather than descriptive classes. Thus, the design envisions undergraduates as full participants in planning and producing the class. Curriculum and Instruction, History, and Computer Science undergraduates all contribute unique skills to this project—they create the lesson plans, collect archival data to complete oral histories and design visuals, and record interviews and construct those visuals—using departmental expertise and methodology. This collaborative approach to instruction enhances areas of study and broadens knowledge of the global issue of forced migration.

16-Week Course: Understanding Coastal Displacement Using Oral Histories in Virtual Reality

Under the direction of a professor in Education, Engineering, and History, undergraduates work together to determine a critical focus for their research. The undergraduates investigate what problem or issue they want to focus on. A plan for course creation will have students meeting together in some weeks and working in their respective disciplines.

Weeks 1-2

All: Choose a narrative thread to illustrate the impact of displacement on the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation community. Complete the Institutional Review Board Application for the project.

Weeks 3-4

  • Students in Curriculum and Instruction: Determine what grade, standards, and activities align with the chosen topic. Identify a local middle school interested in letting their students participate in the research.

  • Students in History: Research archival data to determine how to frame the oral history questions and what visuals could be turned into 3-D models to help make the information more engaging and immersive.

  • Students in Computer Science: Research what software will be used and then begin to create a program that will house the 360-degree oral histories and interactive models.

Weeks 5-6

Curriculum and Instruction and History: Conduct oral histories and collect any narrator artifacts that need to be added to the VR environment.

Computer Science: Continue to build the program and start to build 3-D models.

Weeks 7-8

Curriculum and Instruction and History: Analyze oral histories and edit to use for lesson plan creation.

Computer Science: Continue to build the program and 3-D models.

Week 9

All: Share each group’s progress and make a final plan of which oral histories and artifacts will be used to create the lesson plans.

Weeks 10-12

Curriculum and Instruction and History: Create a pre- and posttest to gauge the effectiveness of the lessons and make final arrangements with the partner school for implementation.

Computer Science: Embed 360-degree videos and finish 3-D models.

Week 13

All: Debug VR lessons and demonstrate within the class and other undergraduate students (these could be friends of students in the class or students in other classes of the professors that are interested in the subject and would like to participate in helping to debug).

Week 14-15

All: Implement lessons into chosen K-12 classrooms.

Week 16

All: Analyze data from pre- and posttest and debrief.

Considerations

A few things immediately come to mind when planning to undertake such an important but logistically complicated project. First, it can be hard to get three professors from different disciplines to form a cohesive project for their students. The professors of each discipline will need to think strategically about how they will teach the method of oral history, lesson creation, and programming in such a short time. The short-term goal is to create the lesson, but in the long term, the goal is to teach undergraduates about what is going on in their communities and what actions they can take to make a difference. Another challenge is for universities or colleges to acknowledge the extensive time commitment to develop and teach such a class, and to grant course credits to all three faculty.

Conclusions

First-hand, place-based, immersive experiences, as described earlier, are an ideal means of deep learning. To gain a complex historical perspective of the world, one must observe the layers created in documenting and telling stories from different contributors. Teaching displacement using oral histories in virtual reality supports a scientific, technology-centered perspective on ecological issues. With a class such as this one, direct exposure to personal immersive experiences allows for the development of ethical, emotional, and social connections to sustainability issues. The lessons provide an engaging way to learn about the environmental impact on affected communities. Students in such immersive learning experiences can absorb, understand, and think critically about how human activities and natural phenomena intersect to affect community resilience and sustainability.

When Chief Naquin was asked about the impact of the oil companies on the Island, students learned that, “They affected the Island plenty, a whole bunch. Our first oil well was right next to my house. They dug a pipeline to come from Montegut, and they went all the way to where the drilling rig was at.” But Jean Charles Choctaw Nation tribal member Chantel Comardelle also stressed their resilience in the face of this encroachment. Asked what others should know about the tribe, she replied, “The most important thing. That we are here, and we’re just trying to keep our future alive. We’re not trying to gain. We’re just trying to live.”