What can different academic disciplines teach students about processing the pandemic?
This new title will help educators discuss COVID-19 with students across 25 areas of study
By Olivia Butze, Senior Corporate Communications Associate
“When the pandemic hit, the 17.8 million students enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States likely looked to their peers and instructors for help with processing the crisis—to make some sense of all that was happening to them and around them. In choosing their courses and deciding on majors, they had signed on to ways of seeing the world, and they wanted to know how those perspectives held up now,” write Drs. Joan Ferrante and Chris Caldeira in the preface to their new title How to Respond in a Pandemic: 25 Ideas from 25 Disciplines of Study.
Conceptualized in mid-March and published this month, the title will help both educators discuss the pandemic in the classroom and students see their discipline and the pandemic in a new way. And with more than 25 contributors covering 25 disciplines—including subjects in the social sciences, humanities, and STEM—the book offers many lessons to take away.
Both social scientists, Drs. Ferrante and Caldeira were originally interested in answering “What can our discipline of sociology offer?” But their thoughts began to extend to other fields of study as well, leading to the conception of the book. And while each chapter centralizes on one discipline, they all draw from each other – e.g. humanities chapters posing questions that the social and behavioral sciences can best answer.
We’ve opened four chapters from the title, to help students and educators better understand the pandemic through a disciplinary lens. Read them below and learn more about the title here.
Sociology: “Know That Things Are Not What They Seem” by Joan Ferrante and Chris Caldeira
Political Science: “Join Together in an Age of Apart” by Ryan Salzman
School Counseling: “Keep Looking for the Students Who Have Not Connected” by Donita Jackson