Sparking Intentional and Antiracist Pedagogy: A Narrative Analysis of COVID-Era Interviews with Public Health Faculty

The COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice uprisings of 2020–2022 created an altered and challenging landscape for teaching public health. Challenging and direct experiences with these public health issues and their reverberations shaped how some faculty and many students participated in both onli...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEducation sciences Vol. 14; no. 7; p. 777
Main Authors Tsui, Emma K, Cooper, Spring, Jardine, Shari J, Dearolf, Michelle, Whang, Christine, Quiroz, Ivonne, Elsayed, Ayah
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.07.2024
Subjects
antiracism
College teachers
COVID-19
Faculty Development
Learning Processes
narrative research
Oppression
oral history
pedagogy
Public health
Racism
Students
Teaching
Teaching Methods
New York
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Summary:The COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice uprisings of 2020–2022 created an altered and challenging landscape for teaching public health. Challenging and direct experiences with these public health issues and their reverberations shaped how some faculty and many students participated in both online and in-person classrooms. In this project, we conducted a narrative analysis of oral history interviews with eight faculty members at a public university in New York City to understand how they reacted to these events and reconsidered their public health teaching during this period. We map what propelled faculty along paths of change and where these paths led. We learn that participating faculty shifted in varied ways toward more intentional and sometimes more antiracist teaching practices. Two experiences were foundational to these shifts: (1) faculty attunement to student realities during this time, and (2) faculty reflection on their own social positionings (i.e., race, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, age, immigration status, etc.) and their development of critical consciousness. These findings provide insights into how faculty conceptualize, support, and change their teaching approaches during periods of upheaval, particularly in the context of limited institutional support for faculty development. Finally, we discuss key issues for institutions seeking to formalize and enhance shifts like those described.
ISSN:2227-7102
2227-7102
DOI:10.3390/educsci14070777