Schooling Pandemics

Catalog description

COVID-19 was not the first pandemic. It will not be the last. Colleges and schools - typically slow-moving, conservative institutions - had to rapidly respond to the crisis. What were the effects of these transitions on education and public health? This seminar course draws on this question not just for the COVID-19 pandemic, but historical public health crises as well. The course will examine how the medieval universities (Cambridge, Oxford, Coimbra, Bologna, etc) responded to outbreaks of the plague. Students will learn how schools in the 1920s-1940s served as a springboard for mass vaccination against Polio and examine the ways in which K-12 schools respond to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Students will write a case study paper using historiographical and social-science methods as the final product for the course. Satisfies Educational Studies Interdisciplinary major and minor requirement.