Taking
COVID to the
Classroom
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, faculty and students were forced to adjust quickly to a new world and a new way of learning. Two faculty members in HCaP took the changes as an opportunity to provide students with hands-on experiences addressing real world problems and being part of the solution. DEMOGRAPHY
Kara Joyner, department chair and professor in the Department of Demography, developed a course for undergraduate students that used the pandemic as a laboratory for research. Prior to joining UTSA, Joyner knew there was great potential for a COVID-19 related course. In her previous position at Bowling Green State University, Joyner had conducted a survey of students in her demography course about their interest in working on a COVID-19 project and they seized the opportunity. Kara Joyner
“I was struck by how engaged students were in the project and how well they worked together, despite their anxiety and physical isolation,” Joyner said. “This made me realize the COVID-19 pandemic offers a great laboratory for learning and applying demographic methods.” When she joined the UTSA College for Health, Community and Policy faculty last summer, she found a home for the course as part of UTSA’s Honors College curriculum. Demographers have gravitated toward COVID-19 data because they have the tools to locate hot spots for the virus, identify groups that are more exposed and vulnerable to it and track its change over time.
13 ENGAGE | UTSA College for Health, Community and Policy
The course exposed students to evidence from the “natural experiments” that were created when states and counties began implementing social distance measures in March and April of 2020. These experiments have allowed researchers to infer the causal effects of these measures on COVID-19 cases. “News stories have suggested that young adults were driving the surge in COVID-19 cases in states like Texas last summer,” Joyner said. “Now stories are intensely focused on the spread of COVID-19 cases at different colleges and universities across the country.” In the course, students had the opportunity to observe what is happening around them using a scientific lens. “What we learned in the class was not only how to dissect the data of COVID-19 and present it in a factual matter, but as we looked through the data, the story of the pandemic was pretty clear,” said Scott Koonce, a junior psychology major. “We never know what to believe in the news and having the data to interpret from the CDC and other government agencies allowed us, as students, to form factual based assessments.” The course had more than a dozen students enrolled and covered research from multiple disciplines taking place across the world on the ever-changing virus. It covered topics that helped students navigate the sea of data on COVID-19.
