Living Through History: Teaching Pandemics During the COVID-19 Crisis by Margaret Smith, MA
We have spent the last year living through a global pandemic that has impacted Bellevue University students in pervasive and profound ways. Their lives — not only as students but often as parents, community members, and fulltime workers (and many in front-line jobs!) — have been thrown into uncertainty. The pandemic presents a unique opportunity to engage students by helping them contextualize their own experiences through the lenses of our academic disciplines. As a historian, I have been able to emphasize historical health crises such as the Justinianic plague, the Black Death, the introduction of European diseases to the western hemisphere, and 1918 flu. I have helped students build deeper connections with the material and given them opportunities to explore greater truths about what it means to be human in a moment of global upheaval. While my own experiences are specific to teaching history, I’d like to suggest that teachers across disciplines can draw out parallels between the pandemic and current events more broadly to help enrich and deepen students’ learning and engagement.