Written by Faye Wills
As we move closer to September, the issues surrounding the return to school in the midst and aftermath of Covid are critical. Aside from the obvious uncertainty around the spread of the disease amongst students and staff, and the inherent mental health issues arising from loss of loved ones and isolation from social circles, there is the necessity to decide whether teachers should be engaging students in class via what I am tentatively calling ‘the Covid lens’. To me, this means using Covid – a collective experience shared by all people living at this time that has affected everyone in some way – as a tool for teaching.
LASAR is currently engaged in looking at the practicalities of this. Researchers are working with faculty staff and schools to investigate the benefits and limitations to, and subsequent implementation of, a reworked curriculum which provides spaces for contemporary conversation and collaboration across curriculum areas in schools. So far the research has included an analysis of the curriculum for science and other subjects and dialogue with teachers, student-teachers and faculty staff during lockdown to investigate their views on what can and should be taught. In order to assist with this from a humanities perspective, I looked back to my second placement of my PGCE, which has been undeniably affected by the pandemic.
Prior to full quarantine being enforced, I was teaching the Great Plague to my Year 8s, and was about to tackle the Black Death with my Year 7s – figuratively of course! Already it was becoming clear to me that even though I was explicitly trying to avoid diverging off the topic area by comparing Covid with the Great Plague, my students were almost doing the opposite. I found that they were, in fact, acutely more aware of the methods of disease transmission and prevention than I had expected – primarily because during an activity I set my Year 8s to question why the Great Plague spread so quickly and was so devastating, they explicitly told me about memes, videos and headlines that they had seen on Facebook or TikTok or Instagram or on the news about hand-washing, wearing masks, and reducing contact with other people.
It got me thinking about how, with everyone in my class being exposed to this type of cultural content, I might be able to use it to my advantage, and by extension whether it would benefit teaching in my new school to develop conversations around the topic to help students understand the complexities of pandemics in the past. Could I use the shared experience of Covid to help my students explore key historical concepts, such as ‘change and continuity’, ‘diversity’ and ‘significance’?
To do this, I began with a discussion group, in order to ascertain whether colleagues of mine had had similar experiences of Covid ‘appearing’ in the classroom. It was conducted via Blackboard Collaborate and consisted of 2 sections; ‘yes or no’ questions followed by 2 extended response questions. There were 4 other NQTs in addition to myself in the discussion.
The first section ‘yes or no’ questions and their responses were as follows:
1. When you were in school, did you have conversations with students directly about covid?
Yes: 5
No: 0
2. Did you teach the Great Plague or the Black Death during the pandemic?
Yes: 3
No: 2
3. If you taught either or both, did you refer to the current pandemic explicitly as comparison?
Yes: 1
No: 2
4. If you taught either or both, did you refer to the current pandemic implicitly?
Yes: 0
No: 3
5. Did you find students themselves drew on current experiences to add to class discussions or answer questions?
Yes: 4
No: 1
This demonstrated that many pupils are already aware of links between the Covid and pandemics of the past. Even if this link is primarily implicit (e.g. learning more about transmission and prevention via social media and developing class discussions around why people of the past did not know or implement these things), it is evident that this shared experience is useful for students and staff to draw on.
In section 2 of the discussion, I asked 2 broad extended response questions. This, and the main points of the subsequent conversation, are summarised below (NB – these are not quoted verbatim unless appearing in inverted commas):
1. As a history teacher, what are your thoughts about the ‘warfare’ analogy some people and media outlets are using to describe Covid?
NQT1: “Problematic”, “stereotyping”, “divisive”; makes it seems as though there is an enemy, China, because they ‘started’ the virus.
NQT2: “Very divisive, ‘us vs them’ mentality”; however, the “wartime spirit and camaraderie arising could be seen as positive”; obvious connections between the stay-at-home messages today with the propaganda slogans during the world wars.
NQT 3: in some ways the experience of today is similar to experiences of war; danger towards international relations, “virus is a common enemy”, agreed with NQT2 about camaraderie, whole concept of ‘Doing Our Bit’ – “I get it” [sic.] – but we should be careful not to simplify it; we don’t want to undermine the experiences of those who were actual victims of war.
NQT 4: I do not agree with the ‘war’ metaphor, I think it is problematic for the following reasons:
▪ the current circumstances are too different to the period of world war; e.g. in 1918, when the influenza pandemic swept across the world, many businesses were not able to close to stop the infection spreading because their work was vital to the war effort, and this is not the case today.
▪ the NHS did not exist during either of the world wars, so the idea of ‘protecting it’ could become a misconception associated with these; similarly disease prevention and surgical procedures were far less developed during the wars.
▪ the analogy makes the situation too nationalistic – it creates an enemy where there is not one, and this has demonstrably increased xenophobia and violence towards people from Far East Asia.
▪ the nationalistic element also feels as though it is creating a competition between nations affected, as though they are trying to outdo one another against the ‘common enemy’ and are not presenting a united front.
▪ Covid is not an ‘active’ enemy; that is, it did not decide to ‘attack’ humans; it gives the disease agency and suggests that it alone is responsible for the deaths of its victims, removing any responsibility from the people who spread it or the government for failing to act in time – creates this idea that we are ‘helpless’.
▪ suggests that those who sadly lost their lives did not ‘fight’ hard enough to survive – that they were able to control their ‘battle’ against the disease and that it was their own fault they ‘lost’.
2. As a history teacher, what are your thoughts about the ‘plague’ analogy some people and media outlets are using to describe Covid?
NQT5: interesting that students were drawing parallels between the anthrax outbreak we were studying and Covid, without prompting them, because both outbreaks started with people eating bats; they made the connection between these two ‘plague events’ themselves.
NQT2: it can be risky to compare plague events in this way because it can lead to assumptions that the scenarios were the same in each case; e.g. the population of Europe during the Black Death was much smaller than it is today, the knowledge of disease transmission and prevention was very limited at the times of past pandemics etc, so it is important to make note of the differences as well as similarities.
NQT3: class to class knowledge will vary; also we must be careful not to go “down the rabbit hole” and move away from the actual topic we are teaching if we are using Covid to help teach past pandemics, as it could invite discussions that are not relevant; perhaps form time is a better option to explore links like this?
NQT2: unsure if history lessons are the right place to develop these discussions; PSHE might be more appropriate; in history it could detract from the actual topic and we teachers may have to “battlejokes, or address misconceptions about Covid” that then move away from the actual topic; we must also be aware of students’ experiences.
This is only a small sample of history teachers representing a selection of schools in Kent, and a wider study would help if we are to understand the full sentiment of history educators at this time. However, their opinions do reflect some of the discussions being had over social media about the metaphors that have been utilised to describe the Covid pandemic. It also shows that whilst some teachers may be hesitant to develop historical links to the past by using the shared cultural memory of Covid, students themselves seem quite ready to do so.
This is still an ongoing field of study for LASAR and so as of this time I do not yet have a concrete answer, but I will be working over the summer to see whether I can come up with a method of weaving Covid sensitively but usefully into my lessons.
If this is an area of research and/or pedagogy that interests you – I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me via the LASAR email address – LASAR@canterbury.ac.uk and put fao Faye Wills in the subject line.