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Students will likely be flocking to public health courses and programs in upcoming semesters. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has piqued the interest of many in society, among them college students. Students who have an interest in health, medicine, or science now may see public health as a viable career option, especially with numerous public health researchers being featured in stories and social media around the globe. Although this is an important moment for our field and discipline, universities training future public health professionals will need to recalibrate how they approach their teaching in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
OUR PEDAGOGY MUST BE TRAUMAINFORMED
The COVID-19 pandemic has shocked every facet of daily life, thus ensuring that public health concerns cannot be disregarded as peripheral to students. Many students will have been directly affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. Students may have experienced the illness themselves or find themselves grieving people who have died of complications of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Many of our students and their families may be affected economically because of the disruptions from the COVID-19 crisis. This will result in a change to our students' lives that we cannot ignore as teachers. As public health experts tasked with preparing a new generation of professionals in our field, we will need to ensure that our pedagogical approaches do not exacerbate the trauma from which students will be healing as they explore their vocation into our profession. Traumainformed pedagogy ensures that students feel emotionally and physically safe in our classrooms and reduces the risks of retraumatization.1 Adjacent disciplines, such as social work and psychology,2 have long developed and practiced trauma-informed pedagogy, but public health professors must develop discipline-specific tools to make this a priority for all public health classrooms.
The call for trauma-informed pedagogy in public health is not a new one, especially among students and teachers of color. Our students of color and students from marginalized communities have, of course, always faced these traumas in our public health classrooms.3 Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic will make trauma-informed pedagogy a priority for all teachers. The benefits of adopting this practice...