Viruses Don't Discriminate, But People Do: Teaching Writing for Health Professionals in the Context of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter.

• Date: 22 March 2023
• Author: Harris-Moore, Deborah

Teachers of writing are not therapists. This much I know. That seems obvious, but it's not so obvious in times like these. Nor was it obvious when I co-wrote an article on teaching in times of trauma in 2016. I wrote about teaching writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) during the remaining two weeks of the 2014 spring quarter after Elliot Rodger murdered six students before killing himself. My co-author wrote about teaching in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Both of these events, though caused by different forces, revealed underlying issues of misogyny and racism. Both events caused major crises for teachers and students alike; after all, "[t]raumatic events that threaten life, health, body integrity, and the lives of others are ubiquitous and have life-altering impacts for a substantial portion of individuals" (Gerhart, Canetti, Hobfall, 2015, p. 4). We concluded that, while we are not therapists, we felt a responsibility to address challenges and inequalities in our classes when unforeseen traumatic events were happening in our communities, and to give students agency in that process.

At the time that we wrote the article, we didn't imagine horrific catastrophes like mass murder and deadly hurricanes happening directly around us again during our teaching careers. Then the unthinkable happened in March of 2020 for all instructors and students across the globe. At UCSB, classes were canceled two days before the end of winter quarter. It was official: spring quarter was to be taught online due to a global pandemic called Covid-19. I was assigned to teach two sections of the upper-division course, Writing for Health Professionals, online that spring (along with two sections in the summer) and had two weeks to plan.

I had taught Writing for Health Professionals many times before, but had never taught it when it seemed so exigent. Nor had I ever taught a class online. When speaking with colleagues, I referred to it as a "hall of mirrors"; that is, I was forced to teach a class online because of and during a pandemic to students who, as health workers, will be dealing directly with challenges like pandemics. Moreover, the pandemic was only one of several national challenges. The Black Lives Matter movement was not new, but the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police occurred mid-quarter and prompted national outcry. People were marching and protesting, and in certain places, violence erupted. Medical aides stood by, trying to help protestors who were injured, and many aides were injured in the process themselves. Some medics have since launched lawsuits with the backing of the ACLU (Mansoor & Most, 2020).

During the three weeks or so before the class began, Covid-19 dominated the headlines and caused unprecedented anxiety in the masses. Former president Donald Trump and major political figures referred to it as the "Chinese virus" as soon as the news became public, which many identified as xenophobic (Vazquez, 2020). Soon after the class began, the issue of racial inequality due to police brutality dominated headlines along with the pandemic. Many students were fully aware that Covid-19 was disproportionately affecting people of color, with far more minoritized patients dying than their white counterparts. Referencing the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gary Kreps (2006) describes this problem in his article on racial inequalities in medicine:

Health disparities cross a range of different health risks and
                diseases. The two major known causes of mortality for African Americans
                are heart disease and cancer, followed by stroke, the same as for
                non-Hispanic Whites, although the risk factors and incidence
                morbidity, and mortality rates for these diseases are generally far
                greater among African Americans than for non-Hispanic Whites (pp
                760-761)
                

In other words, health inequity wasn't a new phenomenon in the context of Covid-19. If these challenges weren't enough, the Trump administration appeared increasingly anti-science. I was struggling once again, as I had back in 2014, to figure out how much to include already overwhelming and media-saturated topics in class, and whether I should encourage students to talk and write about them knowing that it could be triggering.

Much of the news media was bleak and overwhelming. Just as some populations were disproportionately affected by Covid-19, my experience teaching in the aftermath of a mass shooting revealed a wide variety of student responses and coping mechanisms to the traumatic event. As James Gerhart, Daphna Canetti, and Stevan E. Hobfoll (2015) point out, "Although trauma is ubiquitous, the long-term response to trauma is complex and ideographic, with individuals showing unique reactions to the traumatic event based on the unique ecology in which they live" (p. 4). Some of the students expressed their anxieties about...