Category Archives: History Education

Teaching About COVID-19 and Justice

This blog post by history educator Christopher Martell provides inquiry questions and online resources for social studies teachers seeking to teach about COVID-19, focusing on the central question of the role of injustice in people’s experiences during the pandemic.

Christopher C. Martell is an Assistant Professor at the College of Education and Human Development, University of Massachusetts Boston. His research focuses on social studies teachers in urban and multicultural contexts, and how they use culturally sustaining pedagogy, historical inquiry, and teach for social justice.

A Bibliography of Historians’ Responses to COVID-19

The American Historical Association is compiling a professionally vetted bibliography of historians’ responses to COVID-19 as a resource for the public, teachers, and scholars seeking historical perspectives on the current crisis and its local and global impacts.

The bibliography includes commentary and publications by historians in both scholarly and popular periodical literature; recorded lectures and webcasts; and digitized primary source materials from past epidemics and pandemics. In amassing these references, the AHA seeks to provide a space where anyone, regardless of expertise, can find digital historical material relevant to the COVID-19 crisis. Educators will find the bibliography especially useful as a professionally vetted index of online resources amenable to remote instruction.

Pandemic Syllabus

Created by three historians of public health, this reading list provides a range of voices and perspectives that give context not just to COVID-19 but also to the medical, scientific, cultural, political, and economic structures that shape this and other pandemics. They are structures that, beyond biology alone, are often what make pandemics selectively—and unequally—deadly.

David Barnes, Merlin Chowkwanyun, and Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, “Pandemic Syllabus,” Public Books, July 13, 2020.

COVID-19 Module

In partnership with the National Council for Social Studies (NCSS), the World History Digital Education Foundation offers  a set of free resources for Social Studies teachers to address the current COVID-19 pandemic. The Learning Module is composed of 3 days:

  • Day 1: historical comparison to the Influenza Pandemic of 1918
  • Day 2: geographic analysis of diffusion and population pyramid analyses of several countries
  • Day 3: examining globalization and government responses to the crisis

These days have been designed to be taught via distance learning or in person. There are student files that can be pushed out to students in a virtual learning setting.

Global Views of Covid-19

University of California at Berkeley’s Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS) created this webinar series to help teachers deepen their understanding of the unfolding pandemic and how regional context affects the spread of the virus, political responses to the pandemic, and economic consequences for everyday people. Each webinar in the series explores the pandemic in one region. There are also links to slidedecks, recordings (as available), and additional resources.