Want to see what the student side of life was like during the Fall 2020 pandemic semester at UK? My students in GEO 261 Global Dynamics of Health were required to keep Covid blogs to fulfill UK Core standards. Each week students provided details about their lives with Covid. They were also asked to respond to weekly prompts presented and discussed in their Friday recitation meetings. Are US college students at a competitive disadvantage because of the disruptions caused by Covid? What happens if one country 'wins' the vaccine race? How should vaccines be distributed? What are the ways in which Covid is global as well as local? How have memes been used to convey the politics of Covid? These are some of the topics the students reflected upon with this activity. However, it was their individual entries that captured the way in which this global pandemic was not only one shared experience, but many different ones. I was surprised by how many of the students had or were exposed to Covid. And of course, there are student lives not represented here because their economic precarity kept them too busy to make regular contributions to their blog or they were just unable to go to school this semester. Those are the stories that need telling as well. These student blogs below, as well as the best entries from each of the 200+ students in my class, were uploaded into the UK Library's archiving program In This Together. My colleague in the Department of Geography, Nari Senanayake, is teaching GEO 261 in Spring 2021 and plans to continue this archiving initiative. Thanks to my TAs this fall, Aleks Craine and Michael McCanless for helping with this project. (I wonder how long it will be before I will have to take this post down because someone will decide that the content in this blog does not follow the formal or informal politics of information disclosure.)
Thursday, December 17, 2020
Covid History Project - Student blogs
