For Conn, COVID-19 is now part of the curriculum
The New London newspaper The Day features two Connecticut College English professors in an article published today about colleges incorporating the pandemic into their classes.
In a Media Rhetoric and Communication course, Associate Professor of English Jeff Strabone is discussing the misinformation surrounding the coronavirus that is being disseminated in certain media outlets.
“COVID-19 is an epidemic, but it’s also a media event, so we need to think critically about the media that accompanies the epidemic,” Strabone told The Day, adding, “Misinformation can kill you.”
Professor of English and MacCurdy Professor of American Studies Julie Rivkin is incorporating COVID-19 into her course on narrative medicine, an interdisciplinary field centered on patients voicing their experiences, thus improving health care services.
According to The Day, students were asked to write about how their sense of time has been altered by the pandemic, and another assignment was to respond to poetry that New York Times readers had written in response to the article “The Doctor and ‘The Apocalypse,’” in which a Boston emergency room doctor wrote a poem about the coronavirus crisis.
“The students have been wonderfully responsive, and I think they make it clear this work is helping them,” Rivkin told The Day. “It's kind of a space for them to make sense of what they're going through.”
