Open Access‘Covid-19 and Me’. A Serendipitous Teaching and Learning Opportunity in a 1st Year Undergraduate Medical Anthropology Course
Author(s) -
Andrew J. Russell,
Lucy Johnson,
Emily Tupper,
Alice-Amber Keegan,
Halima Akhter,
Jordan Mullard
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
teaching anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2053-9843
DOI - 10.22582/ta.v10i3.604
Subject(s) - covid-19 , face (sociological concept) , medical anthropology , set (abstract data type) , reflection (computer programming) , sociology , psychology , medical education , mathematics education , pedagogy , anthropology , medicine , social science , computer science , virology , disease , pathology , outbreak , infectious disease (medical specialty) , programming language
‘Covid-19 and Me’ was an affective learning blog post exercise assigned to 1st year undergraduate students taking a medical anthropology module at the start of academic year 2020-21. We describe the way in which a collective analysis of the accounts was undertaken and how these were presented and discussed in a set of online and face-to-face seminars. We discuss whether Covid-19 was indeed a ‘portal’ in Arundhati Roy’s use of the term, arguing that it was the written reflection and collective anthropological analysis of their accounts, rather than the virus itself, that enabled students to ‘imagine the world anew’.