Students who enroll in Bryan Carter’s courses on the Harlem Renaissance don’t just get a survey of the period’s rich culture. They immerse themselves in it.
For two decades, Mr. Carter, now an assistant professor of Africana studies at the University of Arizona, has been experimenting with technology to help students get inside the material. The literature and art and music of the period remain central, but students do more than read poems and listen to jazz. They use storytelling apps for presentations and do live-streamed broadcasts instead of taking quizzes. They hold class meetings in Virtual Harlem, the virtual-reality environment that Mr. Carter created in the mid-1990s as part of his dissertation work and that he has migrated from platform to platform as technologies have arrived and obsolesced or become too expensive.
“It was an edgy time, it was jazz, it was improvisational,” Mr. Carter, 53, tells his students. “This class is going to be just like that, where some of the things we do are going to be experimental, they’re going to be edgy, they’re going to be visual, just like the Harlem Renaissance was.”
Many of the undergraduates he teaches have grown up playing video games, and they’re used to interactive, audiovisually rich online environments. “I wanted my students to be able to connect with the period that we’re studying,” Mr. Carter says. In his experience, if a professor just tacks a bit of technology onto an otherwise conventional course, students can tell. He makes technology part of the fabric of the class.
Ken S. McAllister, a professor of English at Arizona who was recently named associate dean of research and program innovation there, co-directs the Learning Games Initiative. He regularly takes his own students to visit Virtual Harlem. “When they leave, they always talk about how they felt they were there — that’s the technology — and they talk about the stories that they heard, that they heard a Cab Calloway concert or saw the Apollo Theater or walked along the boulevards,” he says. “It’s technically impressive, but the content, the stories, are really what carry the day.”
Mr. McAllister has known Mr. Carter since their graduate-school days, though they were at different institutions. He describes Mr. Carter as an early adopter and a transdisciplinary scholar. “He’s always talking to artists and designers and computer engineers and musicians and trying to learn from them,” Mr. McAllister says.
Mr. Carter’s approach is also a study in how to maintain and expand a project as the technologies that enable it change. He began the Virtual Harlem project in a CAVE automatic virtual environment, a square, room-sized space outfitted with projection screens or backlit video displays; a person stands in the center of the space, wearing 3-D glasses with a motion tracker to create an immersive experience.
The original CAVE setup worked well for Virtual Harlem but was relatively expensive, requiring developers and designers. So Mr. Carter moved Virtual Harlem to the virtual-world environment Second Life, where users create avatars that allow them to move around and interact in different virtual settings. A couple of years ago, he switched it to OpenSim, an open-source version of Second Life. That hasn’t been ideal as a production tool, he says. The next iteration will use a 3-D web browser, Curio, being created by a company called the Virtual World Web. Curio uses a graphic engine called Unity to create interactive and 3-D experiences. “It takes the graphic quality up about 20 notches,” he says.
As the technologies have grown and changed, so have the courses Mr. Carter teaches. He’s expanded from the Harlem Renaissance to the experience of African-American expats in 1920s Paris and Berlin, and has added augmented-reality components to the curriculum. Working with Julia Brown, a former Sorbonne student who runs a Paris walking-tour company called Walking the Spirit, Mr. Carter and his students, who occasionally travel with him to Paris during breaks, have created augmented-reality enhancements for the Paris tours. People can use their smartphones to scan a fixed object like a doorway or sign and pull up photos or audio clips associated with that spot. Students have even starred in their own augmented-reality videos. “We used green-screen technology and we had students dressing up in period clothing, and we placed them in various locations,” he says. “That was a lot of fun.”
Dressing up as Langston Hughes or a flapper is one thing. What about the more technologically complex assignments?
“It’s not difficult for them to pick up. You just need time for them to practice,” Mr. Carter says. He makes sure to have lab time reserved in case students run into trouble with their own devices.
If other professors want to incorporate more technology into their classes, he suggests, they don’t have to get fancy about it. “I would advise them to begin with the devices that they have access to and their students have access to,” such as cellphones, tablets, or laptops, he says.
The payoff is students who are not just having fun but who are more invested in the class. “Students take a different sense of responsibility and ownership in the projects they work on when they know it’s not just me looking at them,” Mr. Carter says. Sometimes, when he’s teaching a class in Virtual Harlem, “a random avatar will wander through and ask what’s going on,” he says. Students will often jump in and explain the setup to the visitor.
Kevyn Butler is a junior at Arizona, double majoring in dance and Africana studies. Now enrolled in Mr. Carter’s spring course “The Harlem Renaissance: A Virtual Experience,” he created an augmented-reality project as part of a previous course he took with the professor.
The Harlem Renaissance course covers the essential literature and personalities of the period, as a more conventional course would, he says. He likes how Mr. Carter uses technology rather than lectures to get students to engage with the material. “The content becomes more applicable and in a sense more real,” Mr. Butler says via email. “The requirements for creating these projects demand a deeper understanding of the topic.”
For Mr. Carter, that’s the point of his approach, and he appreciates having found an institutional home that supports it. “There are universities who are starting to see that this is not a passing fad, and that to engage this generation of learners you have to use different strategies and different spaces.”
Jennifer Howard writes about research in the humanities, publishing, and other topics. Follow her on Twitter @JenHoward, or email her at jennifer.howard@chronicle.com.
