Experiential Learning in 2022

The 20 undergraduate students I saw in-class today had not been in a classroom with me since March 2020. At that time I was teaching my Marx lectures in the large second year course, before the campus closed due to COVID. This term they are enrolled in my 4th year seminar “The Politics of Pandemics and Epidemics”, the first half of which we did online covering public health ethics, vaccinations, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and Ebola. Today for our first in-person class it just so happened that we started our first of two sessions on COVID-19 (then we cover obesity, drug use and gun violence). While not the kind of “experiential learning” I envisioned when I agreed to design this new seminar course last year, it has certainly proven to be a somewhat surreal teaching experience this term. We went the full 3 hours of class discussing the relationship between democracy and scientific advisory committees, the ethics of quarantine, the stigma around contracting COVID, amongst other topics.

Cheers,

Colin