Timely teaching: educating around current events in the face of rapid change
Image: @markusspiske
If you’re a teacher in higher ed, have you ever been here? It’s Sunday night. You just finished preparing for Monday’s class when you see the news. It’s controversial and divisive. It has real consequences for the topic you are teaching on Monday. And also might impact your students’ wellbeing directly.
People who teach health politics classes (or any politics classes) will readily tell you how challenging it can be to keep up with current events. So many of us regularly face the challenge of carefully crafting a syllabus over months of painstaking work just to have a new law, policy, or newsworthy political event force a change in plans. This is more true the more we live in interesting times.
As educators, we face several dilemmas in covering these current events. We want to help students understand what’s happening and the forces that are driving change. We know that addressing the event could make the class more relevant and spur deeper learning. But we also feel the burden of fostering real critical thinking around these events, which requires a lot more than just inserting materials into the reading list at short notice.
The stakes are high- we might see failing to cover the issue as failing as a teacher. We might feel the best course of action is addressing the event head on, but dread messing it up due to gaps in our knowledge or a lack of time to prepare. We might fear potential professional criticism, institutional censorship, or personal attacks from students. We might be in a situation where the event is very close to home, highlighting aspects of our own identities or experiences in ways that are not comfortable. We might hesitate to present the event to students because we worry about its impact on their wellbeing.
How can we navigate these challenges? Conversations with some fellow health politics teachers suggest some possible paths forward.
If current events are impacting your classes now
In this scenario, events are unfolding quickly in ways that necessitate mid-course corrections. Some suggestions for action include:
1. Make your rationale explicit
It’s important to know and communicate exactly why you are choosing to discuss or not discuss a current event. If you choose to discuss an event, it is important that students know how and why the discussion is important relative to the core learning objectives of the class. If you choose not to discuss an event, you might want to both explain why that’s the case, as well as consider other ways that what’s happening can be acknowledged inside and outside of class. That might mean finding or creating parallel spaces for discussion, and / or committing to participate in them. In either case, it’s important to consider how you can highlight the humanity and human consequences of what’s happening, and acknowledge potential effects on students in the room, rather than presenting the event as merely an ‘interesting’ topic.
2. Use the three principles of Case, Voice and Interaction to govern how students encounter information about current events
This means thinking carefully about how students encounter ideas and information, at what pace, and in what temporal order. Choosing to pay attention to a current event, while it might have pedagogical advantages, risks signaling that the substance or details of the event are what matters rather than its import as part of patterns or trends. Furthermore, no matter how much you try to set expectations to the contrary, students might assume that when you are assigning a reading that you are endorsing its perspective.
To counter that, first think of the event not as an isolated incident, but as a case of something bigger, connected to other cases of the same phenomenon. As a general rule, don’t introduce a current event or primary piece of evidence until you have explained what it’s a case of. This means exploring connections to events that have happened in the past or in other places or both. Practically, it might mean holding back on fully exploring a current event until you can introduce important historical, social or political context.
Second, think carefully about whose voices you are amplifying when introducing the event, and who gets to speak first. Are the people impacted by the event centered in the materials you are assigning and exploring? Does your presentation of the event include a discussion of actions or suggested actions to address what’s happening that are made by affected people? As part of making connections between the event and other cases of similar events, can you provide students with useful frameworks for analysis or lenses through which the situation can be assessed? If opinions on the event are divided, how are you representing these different viewpoints in the context of other cases of the same phenomenon? Consider that, rather than presenting viewpoints or actors’ positions in isolation, it might be more pedagogically valuable to show connections between them and past cases.
Third, ask yourself how you can build interaction into the encounter. Consider introducing difficult materials live in class, where you can provide necessary context, and students can work through their ideas in discussions, rather than expecting students to get to grips with the material individually as their first encounter.
3. Encourage group learning and exploration
You should consider carefully how you might provide your students with opportunities to ask questions about current events. Having time for students who are paying attention to provide discussion leadership or raise their concerns can allow for a variety of teachable moments and allow faculty to better gauge how current events are affecting students from their perspective. Such moments can allow less in-tuned members of the class to learn from their peers. Moreover, these times can allow for the professor to craft a response based on history or current reporting about how the student's concerns may be addressed or are currently being influenced by the politics of the moment. If you incorporate these question sessions, it may be worth following up as events develop to understand concerns or attitudes about these developments.
4. Know (and communicate) what you don’t know
One of the biggest challenges for teachers who want to introduce current events into their classes is that the causes or surrounding context of the event may not entirely overlap with your areas of expertise. Teachers are human beings with limited time and resources. We can’t possibly know everything about an event the minute it occurs. It might be a while after the event before the full facts or implications are known. It might be difficult for even someone with a degree of expertise to research the implications of what’s happening, especially in this moment where mis- and dis-information are rife, and reliable analysis might be rare.
Dealing with this situation needs some internal preparation and self-knowledge on your part. You might want to practice ways of letting students know clearly when you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge or what’s currently known about the event. That includes making sure that you don’t apologize for not knowing the answer, or feel shame or guilt about these limitations, otherwise you might be tempted to offer a simple explanation for events when the causes and details aren’t yet clear. You might choose to have expectation-setting conversations that highlight uncertainty around current events and make it clear that this uncertainty is shared by others in your discipline. This relates directly to…
5. Collaborate and co-teach
You should avoid being the only voice in the room, and instead think about ways to co-produce knowledge and analysis. This might mean calling on colleagues who can supplement your expertise with knowledge in other areas and could be willing to lead a Q&A at short notice. If you have enough lead time and the right connections, you might also bring in outside experts. If you don’t, another option is to explore co-production of knowledge with students through structured discussion or in class research exercises. But bear in mind that engineering structured discussions during class time relies upon first introducing frameworks or lenses through which the event can be analyzed, as discussed above.
If current events are impacting a course you are preparing to teach
In addition to the above, if you suspect that political disruptions will impact a class you are planning to teach, health politics educators have a bit more advice. You might:
1. Add breathing room to your classes
Unpredictable events require you to make your class time a bit more flexible. There are lots of ways to do this. You might add a few minutes of flex time to every class that can be used for ‘householding’ announcements and assignment discussions when events are slow, but that can be switched to discussion time when needed. You could add flexible guest slots at points during the semester that allow recruitment of relevant colleagues or external speakers. You could also choose to schedule breathing room in the form of student-led discussions or Q&A sessions in advance at various points during the semester, allowing you to have dedicated time to deal with current events but avoiding derailing other topics in the course.
2. Consider links between your classroom and other spaces
In addition to building in dedicated time for current events in your classes, you should consider explicit links between your classroom sessions and other spaces where students have the opportunity to voice opinions about current events, listen to each other, vent frustrations, or receive advice. How can you highlight these spaces for your students, if they exist? If there is not a dedicated space in your degree program for students to address their thoughts about current events, can you create one, or advocate for one?
3. Turn to history
Some courses naturally incorporate lessons from history, while others might be much more focused on the present or a defined body of current knowledge. In the latter case, providing sufficient space to explore different perspectives can be a challenge. Nevertheless, teachers designing courses in uncertain times might want to consider ways to include historical cases and context, particularly those where scholars have assessed the evidence, when differences of opinion and narrative are clear, and where generalizable theories have been developed. Preparing historic cases in advance provides students with the context they need in the moment to understand contemporary events. When students are versed in history, they can often see more clearly the connections between what came before and what’s happening now. An otherwise shocking and disturbing event can become less shocking and more explainable, which in turn leads more easily to exploring what can be done to address the problem.
4. Examine your expectations setting
If you are living in uncertain times, now might be a good point to re-examine the way your course documentation, syllabus, web presence, and introductory class set up expectations around current events. Do you send a clear signal that seeking help in difficult times is normal and expected? Do you offer advice about how to manage student encounters with difficult events, e.g., managing time online or on social media, information seeking strategies, techniques to foster critical thinking or structured self-care? Do you highlight key institutional resources in multiple ways, e.g., in the syllabus, and orally in class? Do you provide resources that give students with no training in the US political system a grounding in the political or policymaking process as it’s supposed to operate? Does any discussion of expectations for the course include a discussion of how current events will be handled and why, or how students with concerns about current events can raise them?
5. Consider notification procedures and flexible alternatives
Students are likely to have a range of opinions on whether current events should be discussed in class. Some students will seek out discussion of what’s happening and feel disturbed when events are not addressed, while others want to avoid these discussions and just get through their class sessions. For these reasons, you may want to think carefully about ways that students can control their level of engagement with current events discussions in class. This might include considering how to notify students about your plans to discuss current events and require parallel consideration of attendance policies. Or structuring activity around a current event as one option against other cases considered in parallel. For the same reasons, choosing to focus required assignments or other graded aspects of the class around knowledge or discussion of a current event might be undesirable.
6. Balance concern with joy
Periods of uncertainty or dramatic political events can cause a lot of distress. That doesn’t necessarily mean that teachers should shy away from covering current events. But it does require meaningful engagement from educators around ways to highlight positive situations, solutions or changes.
With enough lead time, it is possible to design your class in ways that balance the realities of current events with action-oriented, creative, or thoughtful ways to address key problems. This might include design of class exercises or assignments that promote a policy or political imagination, the re-imagining of possible policies and actions in a ‘big picture’ way. It might mean including successful historical or international examples of the ways that people have mobilized to address a problem, highlighting discussions of solutions and action from people affected. It might mean centering, at key points in the class, data-driven narratives of progress against certain problems. Again, contextualization of current events as cases, which can be compared to other cases of the same thing, is key. For while the consequences of today’s big new event may not yet have been addressed, learning from past reactions to big political disruptions can provide solace and advice.
