Sparking Intentional and Antiracist Pedagogy: A Narrative Analysis of COVID-Era Interviews with Public Health Faculty

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice uprisings of 2020–2022 created an altered and challenging landscape for teaching public health. Challenging and direct experiences with these public health issues and their reverberations shaped how some faculty and many students participated in both online and in-person classrooms. In this project, we conducted a narrative analysis of oral history interviews with eight faculty members at a public university in New York City to understand how they reacted to these events and reconsidered their public health teaching during this period. We map what propelled faculty along paths of change and where these paths led. We learn that participating faculty shifted in varied ways toward more intentional and sometimes more antiracist teaching practices. Two experiences were foundational to these shifts: (1) faculty attunement to student realities during this time, and (2) faculty reflection on their own social positionings (i.e., race, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, age, immigration status, etc.) and their development of critical consciousness. These findings provide insights into how faculty conceptualize, support, and change their teaching approaches during periods of upheaval, particularly in the context of limited institutional support for faculty development. Finally, we discuss key issues for institutions seeking to formalize and enhance shifts like those described.

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice uprisings in the United States during 2020–2022 created an altered and challenging landscape for education broadly. In public health education specifically, the events of this time amplified the human dimensions of our classroom topics and dynamics and helped us understand the ways that societal and public health problems are lived by students and faculty. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the mission of the public health field is to “protect and promote the health of all people in all communities” (https://www.cdc.gov/public-health-gateway/php/about/index.html, accessed on 12 July 2024). Our classrooms are spaces where large-scale harms to population health are a primary topic, as are the interventions, programs, policies, and social movements that might change public health outcomes. Some students come to graduate school in public health with direct experience of public health problems, particularly in public universities [1], and most bring a passion for changing the policies, systems, and societal dynamics that create these problems. Racism is one of these societal dynamics, causing people of color to suffer poorer health than White populations across a devasting range of health issues [2,3]. For this reason, racism has been officially deemed “a public health threat” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [4]. And yet, we are still just beginning the urgent work of actively addressing racism and other health and social harms inside of public health classrooms.

In this project, we collected oral history interviews with graduate-level public health faculty in New York City, an early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and an active site of racial justice protest movements. In these interviews, faculty reflected on their experiences of this period, and specifically those in the classroom. In this paper, we use narrative analysis to map what propelled faculty along the path of pedagogical change and where these paths led. We see this mapping as important for understanding how faculty may engage, respond, develop, and change (or not) during periods of upheaval. An understanding of these trajectories, which are largely driven by faculty members themselves (rather than the institution), is especially important in institutional environments that lack formal structures for teaching and learning support (e.g., a teaching and learning center) or structured faculty development sessions.

In this paper, we are interested broadly in what we are calling “intentional pedagogy” and, more specifically, in student-centered pedagogy and antiracist pedagogy, which are two forms of intentional pedagogy that became particularly relevant for public health faculty in this period. By “intentional pedagogy” we are referring to a process in which instructors attend and respond to events unfolding within and around the learning environments they facilitate. (There is a small existing body of literature on “intentional pedagogy”, which primarily addresses the role of teachers in early childhood education, though it does emphasize teacher presence and responsive improvisation as key approaches, e.g., https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/2292/64708/Clark-2023-thesis.pdf, accessed on 12 July 2024) By using this term, we are highlighting that, in practice, the typical incentives and conditions of academia [5] inhibit the amount of active attention and improvisation that instructors apply throughout a course and that continuously intentional pedagogies are not as common as they might seem. We are also highlighting that students in this period have called for such pedagogies [1]. Intentional teaching might take many forms, including student-centered and active learning approaches [6,7]; trauma-informed pedagogy [8] and healing-centered pedagogy [9]; and/or antiracist, equity-centered [10], and culturally-sustaining pedagogy [11]. These approaches share an emphasis on orienting toward students’ needs and desires, building relationships with and among students, creating opportunities to bring their strengths, expertise, and experiences into the classroom, collectively working to cultivate safer/braver spaces, and recognizing and addressing inequities and differences that shape classroom dynamics and learning.

There is strong evidence in recent years that faculty are exploring intentional and antiracist pedagogy in public health. Faculty in this field have explored alternative student-centered approaches to grading and assessment that attend to student motivation and stress [12,13,14], have brought students’ self-reflections robustly into the learning process [15,16], and have sought to incorporate trauma-informed approaches and harm reduction into our thinking about classroom dynamics [1,17]. Experiments in antiracist teaching practices have also emerged, including using student-led photography to build the Public Health Critical Race Praxis [18] and developing an antiracist community engagement course [19].

Many pedagogical changes during this period—like the ones we describe in this article—were aimed at supporting students and better centering their needs and strengths. However, in addition to broad support for students, we are particularly attentive to the anti-oppressive teaching efforts that address inequities of harm and support. Such steps are deeply important considering the impact of systemic racism on communities of color and the importance of “ensuring that public health practitioners, and particularly our leaders, are drawn from the places they are charged with protecting and reflect the communities that they serve” [20]. As in many higher education fields, public health faculty are more likely to be White than their students [21], highlighting the need for both more intensive classroom-based and schoolwide work to bridge diversity in the classroom and cultivate a more diverse faculty. Racism is an enduring and central force in health and educational inequities—hence our focus on antiracist pedagogy in this article. By antiracist pedagogy, we mean “an intent to actively acknowledge and oppose racism in all aspects of the course”, and we see this as a step toward broader efforts to improve inclusion and representation across multiple axes of oppression. This places our work in conversation with the forthcoming Framing the Future 2030 report by the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH), which holds “inclusive excellence through an anti-racism lens” as one of its three core strategies [22].

Theoretical Orientations

While distilling meaning from faculty narratives of this period, two concepts helped to anchor and deepen our thinking. First is the idea of experience-nearness, as it has been theorized in the fields of psychology and anthropology. The second is the idea of critical consciousness, rooted in extensive literature in the field of education and community psychology.

Experience-near describes the knowledge gained from firsthand, direct, personal engagement with the world around us. According to philosopher and psychologist William James, experience-near concepts appear when “thinking of the plane of sense” [23]. These feelings are intense, tangible, and induced by direct life experiences. In contrast, concepts from which individuals maintain “experience distance”, or experience-distant concepts, are abstract and theoretical [24] rather than grounded in lived reality. In this study, experience-near refers to direct, lived encounters with suffering through and surviving the COVID-19 pandemic; direct, lived encounters with racial discrimination and systemic oppression; as well as direct, lived encounters with engaging with and caring for those in these circumstances. On the other hand, experience-distant understandings reflect a degree of psychological detachment from the realities of this period. This disjuncture can result from factors such as privilege, geographical isolation, or a lack of personal connection.

Critical consciousness stems from the work of Paulo Freire, where it is translated as “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” [25]. Freire viewed the development of critical consciousness as a key process in equity-focused, liberatory education. Contemporary scholars define critical consciousness as having three components: (1) critical reflection, (2) political efficacy, and (3) critical action [26]. Research has identified a range of factors that increase the development of critical consciousness, including enhancing awareness of sociopolitical circumstances through small group discussion, welcoming critical questioning, and increasing collective identity [27]. Because Freire’s work focuses on the critical consciousness “of the oppressed”, some question whether and how critical consciousness can be developed by those who experience privilege [28] and how critical consciousness can incorporate intersectional understandings of oppression and privilege [29]. As Godfrey and Burson write [29], “conceptualizing experiences of oppression along single axes of marginalization is incomplete because oppression unfolds uniquely for every individual based on the interplay of social forces acting on each person”.

This project grew out of a desire to document and better understand the pedagogical shifts that faculty undertook in this period and the limits of these shifts. The distinct questions we take up in this paper focus on (1) how faculty engaged with intentional and antiracist pedagogy during this time and (2) what faculty narratives tell us about what moved them toward these practices. We then discuss these changes within the context of the specific institution and academia more broadly, and ways that schools of public health can continue building toward more intentional and antiracist pedagogy.

2. Materials and Methods

The Public Health Education Now (PHEN) project was designed as a collaborative, participatory oral history project to document efforts toward antiracist public health education from 2020–2022 in response to the many challenges, insights, and opportunities of this time. The project was inspired and informed by existing public health and activist oral history projects [30,31]. A detailed description of the participatory design of the project was published previously [1]. We chose oral history in order to allow both spacious exploration of this time from the perspectives of narrators, contextualized by their personal histories (in which pedagogical choices and motivations to change might be rooted), and the ability to archive interviews for future use. Archiving was essential to us because we feared that the urgency around antiracist teaching that was present in this period would atrophy with time. We thus wanted to make accessible the generative tensions and discomforts of this period to remind ourselves and future users of the archive of what actions were taken, why, and what was possible (and not possible) in this period. Ultimately, we hope that the archive might help inform and seed ongoing efforts toward antiracist pedagogy.

2.1. Collection of Faculty Narratives

We recruited faculty and staff broadly from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) through meetings and newsletter announcements, as well as purposively (e.g., via announcements to the Antiracist Teaching Collaborative at the school). All narrators provided written informed consent. Two faculty team members interviewed eight faculty, including each other, over one or two interviews per person that spanned March–August 2022. While our sample is not representative of the faculty at the school, the narrators provided insights into a range of experiences with pedagogy and racial justice work within a public school of public health. The faculty represented three out of four departments; were tenure-track, tenured, and adjunct; and mostly identified as White, though Asian, Black, and mixed-race faculty also participated.

Our interviews blended the techniques of open-ended, in-depth interviewing with oral history’s attention to personal histories that place current experiences in context. The interview guide, created by the original student–faculty team [1], covered topics including a narrator’s background and identities, their personal and academic experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and racism/racial justice movements, and their experiences of and recommendations for public health education (see Appendix A for the interview guide). The interviews ranged in length from 45 min to 1.5 h, and two narrators (Faculty 01 and 08) completed two interviews. We thus collected an average of 90 min of material per narrator.

All interviews were recorded and transcribed. The narrators had an opportunity to review and make edits to the transcripts before considering what parts, if any, they wanted to include in the project’s archive, which we envisioned as a publicly accessible version of these interviews (currently under development). The research was approved by the CUNY SPH Institutional Review Board and included both informed consent processes and a “materials release” process. The materials release process distinguished which materials could be used for anonymous research and which could be made available publicly through the project’s archive. For the public materials, narrators could choose to share video and/or audio and/or transcripts only and decide whether they wanted to use their name or a pseudonym. The materials release process acknowledges that there are potential risks for the narrators associated with making these materials public and thus offers them the ability to change their choices about public availability and anonymity at any time.

2.2. Analysis of Faculty Narratives

From the beginning, the faculty co-leaders recognized the vital importance of inviting students to serve as co-analysts, to contribute their unique perspectives, and to enrich the analysis through triangulation [32]. Moreover, as the two faculty co-leaders were also narrators, student analysts brought outside perspectives and important questions to these narratives in particular. For students to participate fully, we needed to cultivate trust and safety within our group. Throughout this work, we have emphasized generous listening [33] and the value of collaboration/interdependency (e.g., [34]). In our regular analytic sessions in 2023, the faculty co-leaders emphasized the importance of co-learning and each person’s perspective and voice. We also took opportunities to integrate student-led analyses.

To analyze qualitative interviews, thematic analysis is a common approach, particularly in the field of public health. Thematic analysis is useful for identifying core ideas and patterned phenomena in a dataset [35]. It typically focuses on the transcribed text of interviews as the material for analysis. Instead, we chose to use narrative analysis in order to make the most of our oral history materials by (1) attending to faculty members’ personal journeys in this period in the context of their broader histories and lived experiences and (2) centering listening to the interview audio, in addition to working with transcribed text. Listening was important for developing a sense of connection with the narrators and a deeper understanding of their motivations, including the emotional dimensions of these stories, which are often more audible in the recordings than they are visible on the page.

For this reason, the data analysis was guided primarily by Josselson and Hammack’s approach to narrative analysis [36]. This approach consists of five sequential listenings to/readings of the data, which are focused on different tasks. These are as follows: (1) identifying initial thematic content and gestalt, (2) identifying voices with which the text is in dialog, (3) identifying patterns and unity, (4) identifying links between texts and theory, and (5) situating the narrative in relation to others collected in the study. In addition to offering a structured process, this approach emphasizes external and ideological voices that help to animate narratives. We wanted to attend to these voices in particular because of the importance of both disciplinary and cultural learnings (of many kinds—professional, academic, and personal/familial) in the faculty’s pedagogical techniques. Josselson and Hammack’s approach also explicitly addresses bringing the experiences of multiple narrators together, a rarity in narrative analytic guidance. In certain cases, however, we were also struck by the ways that individual narrators spoke through multiple internal voices (e.g., the voice of authority, the voice of vulnerability) and how these voices came together. In these situations, we used the techniques of Carol Gilligan’s Listening Guide approach, especially I-poems and listening for the quality and musicality of voices, to delve more deeply into the tensions within a particular faculty narrative [37]. For the overall process, we assigned two close readers to each of the interviews, and each reader conducted the primary listening/readings and memo-writing for those interviews. Individual readers chose whether to only use the Josselson and Hammack approach or to add in the Listening Guide techniques as well. We compared and discussed listening and memos iteratively. Separately and together, we mapped data and memos into matrices and diagrams [38,39] in order to help organize our thinking and identify patterns.

2.3. Researcher Positioning

The team for this analysis was two faculty members, three doctoral students, one master’s student, and one recent master’s graduate. Emma Tsui and Spring Cooper are both researchers and faculty in the Department of Community Health and Social Sciences at CUNY SPH. Emma Tsui (she/her) is a mixed-race Asian-American and White woman who has worked in public health academia for over 15 years. Spring Cooper (she/they) identifies as polyamorous and bi/pansexual, is White, and has been working in academia for over 15 years. The remaining team members were all doctoral or current MPH students or graduates. Shari Jardine (she/her) is a first-generation Black Caribbean-American doctoral student who has an MPH, and serves as a global health leader at a large hospital system in New York. Michelle Dearolf (they/them) is a white, nonbinary, queer person with chronic pain who completed their MPH and worked as a researcher during the pandemic. Christine Whang (she/her) is a Korean-American doctoral student with over ten years of experience implementing public health programming and research. Ivonne Quiroz (she/her) is a first-generation Latina doctoral student with an MPH who is also an adjunct professor within the public health field. Ayah Elsayed (she/her) is an Arab American public health lecturer who was an MPH student during the pandemic.

3. Results

In these oral history interviews, we learned about the ways faculty saw themselves during this period and how they navigated their lives within and outside of the classroom. While all faculty narratives informed our results, readers will not hear from every narrator in this paper due to our desire to balance the clarity of findings with the complexity of particular stories and experiences. Ultimately, we have summarized our understandings in a figure that traces how greater attunement to the realities of students’ lives in this period—sometimes accompanied by moves toward the development of critical consciousness—shaped the range of pedagogical shifts made by faculty. In the sections that follow, we first describe the Antiracist Teaching Collaborative (ATC) at the school, an important venue for many, but not all, of the faculty narrators, as well as the other paths that faculty took toward intentional and antiracist pedagogy. Next, we describe why faculty members took these steps.

3.1. What Facilitates Faculty Movement toward Intentional and Antiracist Pedagogy?

Many of the faculty at CUNY SPH, who felt urgency around antiracism and pedagogy during this time, came together to form the ATC. To provide insight into what this group was, we begin with the story of how a White faculty member with other marginalized identities (Faculty 03) began working to create what became the ATC, as well as how that work has unfolded in their view. We present this in Box 1 to allow readers to immerse themselves briefly in one of these faculty narratives while also developing an understanding of some of the early tensions within this institution around this work. We focus this paper primarily on individual-level trajectories of change but present information about the important institutional dynamics around these efforts in Box 1 and Box 2.

Box 1. Narrative of the Antiracist Teaching Collaborative’s development.

• After George Floyd’s murder and other acts of police violence in the summer of 2020 and initially feeling “so helpless, and so unsure of any action that I could take that would mean anything”, Faculty 03 began intensive personal work to learn more about racism and antiracism. They recounted:
  • [In Summer 2020], we were at [my partners’] parents’ house and they had some friends over. One person that was there was a professor at some school in New York. He said, “Oh, I got an email, they want us to read this book [about antiracism] before we come back in the fall”. And I was like, “Wait a minute. Schools are doing something about this in the summer? What?” I was like, “What are WE doing?”
  • And so I started calling people around the school. I was told not to push this issue. I was told when we get back in the fall, we’ll see if we can form a committee. I was told, if students push this issue, that would be better. I was so angry. I was like, “We are such a diverse school. We have to be doing better for our students. We know that we live in a racist culture in America. We know that all institutions are racist. All of this. We’ve known forever, but right now we really fucking know it, and we have to do something”. It felt like nobody cared. I was like, “How can you pretend you care about your job or about this institution or about our students at all, and not say that you’re going to do something?”
  • I took some deep breaths and thought about, “Okay, what do I think we should do?” I kept reading as much as I could, and trying to learn before we came back in the fall. And then I thought, “Well, I’m just going to raise it in my department, because my department is full of caring people.
  • We had this first meeting of just people that care about racism, about ending its hold on our school, on our students. We said, “Okay, what are the things we can do?” What emerged from those, first, little planning meetings, was what we now call the Antiracist Teaching Collaborative. We have a decentralized leadership in the collaborative where we all contribute to ideas of what we want to do in the collaborative, and that might include reading books, watching films, inviting speakers in, doing role plays, practicing, how do we do these conversations? How do we help disperse power in the classroom? All of these things became very, very, group-generated, which was so exciting to me to be part of—I don’t think I’ve ever been part of something that felt so co-created, and also so important.
  • We’ve done so much in this time, and yet we still have so much to do. We’ve worked on our own personal understandings of what racism looks like in the classroom and in the school. How are we changing these things on our own individual teaching level? It’s still a fight for some people for us to explain what the problems are and why we need to change these things. Some people still don’t get it. That feels like, “Okay, we’ll just keep doing this. We have more work to do”.
  • We, as a collaborative were meeting weekly for over a year, and then we’ve moved it to bi-weekly in the past year, but with longer sessions. We’ve gotten through several books together, not just reading them, but really talking about how are we applying the things that we’re learning. Our numbers, I feel they’re dwindling a little after two years of having this group. It feels scary to me to feel other people are like, “Okay, we’ve put in a couple of years to this, do we need to do it anymore?” And yeah, we do. How do we keep each other motivated and excited, and still understanding the importance of this? And recognizing that despite all the work we have done in two years that we have not created an antiracist school. The structures of the school are the same. We might have done things in our individual classrooms, which I’m very happy about and think are very important. But we have not shifted the culture of the school yet.
  • Yeah, we have a lot of work to do still. […] Because the world is burning around us, and we need to actually address these systems right now. We need to feel safe. Our students need to feel safe in our classrooms to have the discussions they need to have, and they need to feel empowered. They need to feel like part of a learning community that I’m part of also, and not leading. That’s the only way that we actually get to where we need to be in the future”.

Box 2. Faculty shifts in an institutional context.

• The story in Box 1 provides one example of how faculty members at CUNY SPH found themselves bound by the school’s existing culture while recognizing the imperative for transformative changes at the organizational level. In the interviews, we hear that faculty who attempted to mobilize a response within the institution encountered resistance, regardless of how much power (defined by tenure, level of promotion, relationship to the administration, or other advantaged positionality within the school) they held. The barriers were different across situations, but the message that faculty walked away with was broadly the same. Despite recognizing the urgency of addressing racial injustices and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the institution’s response appeared hesitant to initiate change. Frustration led some faculty to create and participate in their Antiracist Teaching Collaborative to promote introspection and change within the faculty, with a focus on taking concrete steps to better align with the institution’s stated commitment to racial justice and inclusivity.
• While faculty celebrated progress within their classrooms, they also acknowledged the limitations of their influence in effecting broader institutional change. They described frustration with institutional priorities, including the pressure to prioritize research over teaching. The tenure process was also identified as a contributor to the culture of deprioritized teaching, and some faculty emphasized the need to rebalance thinking about the importance of teaching, research, and service in faculty evaluations. Others voiced concerns about the inherently racist structures embedded in tenure approval and grant award processes. The faculty recognized the need for institutional backing to facilitate structural changes and shift the broader culture of the school towards a more pedagogy-focused and antiracist stance.

Most faculty narrators spoke repeatedly about the ATC as their primary space for learning about and experimenting with pedagogy in this period (see Figure 1 for a diagram of ATC activities). Narrators especially highlighted the community aspect of this collaborative learning. As Faculty 06 (White with a “privileged upbringing”) said, “There were faculty that clearly had spent a lot more intense time throughout their lives on this. And then, other faculty who maybe hadn’t spent enough time and were saying, ‘I’m now realizing that I need to start doing this better.’ So, we had a wide range. And to be part of that helped me formalize what I already knew, which was to get better. But to sit there on your own and say, I need to do better, and maybe do some Googling and learn stuff is harder and much less directive. But to be able to have a group of faculty that you can work together on [this] and learn from, was a blessing”. This narrator gestures at how some ATC participants had more experience in practicing antiracist teaching (and perhaps being more experience-near) and others less so. Members of this latter group, many of whom volunteered as narrators for the oral history project, described the work in the Collaborative as eye-opening and challenging, and when considering how the school should proceed, many suggested formalizing and/or requiring activities that were analogous to those they had experienced in the Collaborative. However, alongside this championing of the Collaborative, as the narrator above describes, there was a waning of interest, urgency, and energy in this group over time. (It is worth noting that several people who were regularly involved in the ATC did not volunteer to participate in the oral history project. These individuals tended to have less job security at the school (e.g., doctoral students working as adjunct faculty and tenure-track faculty) and were more likely to be faculty of color than those who did participate. Given that the goal of this work was to record oral histories that could be made available to the public, it is not surprising that these individuals may not have felt comfortable participating. Though we used a flexible narrator-centered release form and gave the option of using a pseudonym, potential narrators likely understood that fully anonymizing these transcripts would be impossible and that the interviews might be a risk to them if they were critical of the institution where they were faculty or students. Notably, we did have tenure-track and adjunct faculty members and faculty of color who chose to participate, even under these circumstances).

A few stories diverged from this centering of the Collaborative, which is instructive. A Black faculty member (Faculty 08) spoke over the course of their interviews about their career-long work toward health justice, particularly their efforts to create classrooms and teams that were connected across racially, economically, and professionally diverse individuals (i.e., they had incorporated intentional and antiracist pedagogical practices into their work for many years). They participated occasionally in the Collaborative, but it was not narrated as central to their experience in this period (in part due to significant administrative responsibilities during this time). After being asked “how faculty should or could be supported in building relationships with and among students toward change and activism”, this narrator raised questions that went beyond others’ suggestions for more Collaborative-type activities. They said, “It’s my question as well, I’ll say that. I’m really challenged by it. […] I think society as a whole has moved away from an understanding of how valuable [building relationships across difference] is. […] the skillsets that are needed to just really sit with people. […] I think in terms of preparing faculty, without them having some prior knowledge and ideally experience of it, it’s really hard to imagine that they could even begin to appreciate the value of it”. This narrator thus identifies the broader societal challenges in centering relationship-building across differences and suggests that faculty (especially those trained primarily in research, they note elsewhere in the interview) generally do not have an orientation toward this.

A completely different type of divergence arose in another faculty member’s narrative (Faculty 04, “from the Jewish working class”). This narrator felt that racism was overemphasized as a problem in the field, noting that gender and class were equally important (We note that engaging repeatedly with this interview highlighted to our research team experientially the complexities of connecting across differences that were noted as societally challenging by Faculty 08. Faculty 04 held views that were, in some cases, counter to the more antiracist views held by our team of analysts. Analysts were sometimes caught off-guard and/or upset by this interview, encountering resistance in returning to it as our analysis processes required.) For this reason, this faculty member was not a member of the Antiracist Teaching Collaborative and had engaged in no explicitly antiracist work. They did, however, describe empathizing with students during the most difficult days of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City and becoming more flexible around classroom assignments and deadlines—a common move toward intentional pedagogy that we discuss further below. An adjunct faculty member (Faculty 05, “first-generation immigrant”) also did not participate in the Antiracist Teaching Collaborative but reflected deeply on their own experiences and positioning in this period. While their orientation toward liberatory education started shortly before the pandemic, the pandemic period accelerated this process. Faculty 05 described urgent engagement in a range of pedagogical training activities in this period (both within CUNY SPH and outside), which further shifted their practices in the classroom toward more egalitarian, collaborative, and connected teaching, as well as greater attention to the circumstances and needs of students of color.

3.2. Why Faculty Moved toward Intentional and Antiracist Pedagogy

Next, we take up the two key processes that led to faculty narrators exploring more intentional and antiracist pedagogical practices.

3.2.1. Attunement to Students’ Realities as a Path toward Intentional Pedagogy

Narrators described their increased awareness of the difficulties of students’ lived experiences during this period, the resonance this sometimes had with their own experiences, and the more empathic engagements that this often generated. As Faculty 01 (“privileged, White”) said, “Once the pandemic hit, it was just like, [students saying] I can’t get you this. […] It was just having an understanding of how much people were now managing at home, with children, with parents, with working, with just how stressful the entire world was, I grew to be a lot more flexible. And now if I don’t hear from a student, I am like, instead of being like, yeah, you know you missed our meeting…I’m like, are you okay, is everybody alive? Is everybody feeling okay? Do you have COVID? I mean, I don’t ask these things, but these are the things that run through my mind. And I’m just checking in to make sure that you’re okay. I think that has been a very positive and much needed shift that I needed to make”. We conceptualize this as a new attunement to the lives of students, in which faculty paid close attention and calibrated some aspects of their pedagogy (deadlines, grading, or interactions) in response.

Though this process was often reactive, some faculty proactively made space in the classroom for students’ realities. As Faculty 03 (White with other marginalized identities) said, “I had so many students telling me how bad their mental health was. How unconnected they felt. How isolated they felt. I think the icebreakers [which Faculty 03 used at the beginning of each class session] actually probably gave people some ability to open up to me, because we’re creating a space where we’re allowing for conversation and for sharing of personal things. I model that also. I’m always sharing things about myself. So students feel free to do that with me also, and I encourage that. I always tell students like, ‘Come to me, tell me what’s going on. So we can make new plans for submissions or for edits or for whatever you need’”.

In the interview excerpts above, we see faculty as creating and acting on increased experience-nearness to students, which comes from listening and attunement. Working with voices in our analysis allowed us to hear that some narrators spoke about their and students’ experiences of this time in more intellectual and professional tones and styles (more experience-distant), while others spoke with great emotion, presence, and vulnerability, eschewing more detached modes of expression and analysis. (See Appendix B for the table of voices identified through this analysis). Often, narrators in this latter group shared their experiences with students as vivid stories rather than conveying their experiences with or perceptions of students in broader, descriptive strokes. What we take from these different styles of narration is not straightforward. Narrators’ modes of expression are complex and dynamic, reflecting a multitude of factors, which likely include narrators’ communication tendencies, emotional presence, cognitive and emotional processing, as well as the context of the interview and interviewer. We wonder, though, if these modes of expression might tell us something about the ways faculty become more experience-near; for instance, that experience-nearness grows in the presence of instructors’ emotional awareness and ability to view themselves and students as enacting a shared story.

3.2.2. Awareness of Social Position and Critical Consciousness as Paths toward Antiracist Pedagogy

Faculty members wove experiences of reflecting on their social position (i.e., race, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, age, immigration status, etc.) and its meaning into their interviews in a variety of ways. For some, this appeared to be a long-standing reflective process that could not be isolated from their broader life and work trajectories. Faculty 08′s narrative provides the most robust example of this. They described an early awareness of how they were interpreted racially in the context of elementary school (“as the only black child for years in my elementary school”), how teachers and fellow students navigated this, and what Faculty 08 learned from these experiences. Their interview unfolded as stories of relationships and places that taught them about privilege, social justice, belonging, and otherness in the context of American racism again and again. Unlike most other interviews in which reflection on social position came up as a relatively brief response to our opening question of “background” relevant to pedagogy at this time, Faculty 08′s reflection continued mostly uninterrupted for an hour. At that point, they said, “Everything I’ve shared with you, I feel I have brought into my own pedagogy. I didn’t know that would be so long [laughs]”. And indeed, Faculty 08′s interview included an in-depth description of exercises and practices they use in their classrooms to help students connect across differences in experiences of oppression, stories of learning from students, and intentional efforts to cultivate respect, trust, and care with students, (as antiracist approaches would have us do) (For a detailed description of these techniques, readers may email the authors for access to Faculty 08′s interview transcript while the public archive is still being created).

For others, a greater reflection on social position was hastened by the events and racial tensions of this period. Faculty 02, for instance, while growing up Asian in a largely White, upper-middle-class neighborhood, described a mostly colorblind approach to race. The residue of this history inhibited seeing themself racially until the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement and then more strongly as anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic grew. About that earlier time, they said, “I just was not that engaged with my racial identity. I thought of myself as who I am, this individual person walking around on the street, just being who I am in my life. I did not think of myself as an Asian woman of a certain age walking around on the street. And suddenly, through these violent incidents that have been happening in New York and elsewhere, targeting Asian people and targeting Asian women, I had to confront that reality. That that is who I am. And that this is how so many people in marginalized communities experience the world”. Faculty 02 linked this experience to their enhanced attention to racial dynamics in the classroom and their desire to create connected spaces in the classroom and told a story of one important failure on their part to do this, where racial dynamics among students threatened to derail a project, leading to a more antiracist and care-oriented re-envisioning of this project through the use of restorative practices.

The ATC provided a platform for reflection that individuals took up to varying degrees. In some cases, faculty recognized the biases present in our treatment of course content (e.g., noticing which authors are prioritized on syllabi and rethinking the teaching of race as a quantitative variable). In others, they came to understand their participation in racist structures and dynamics in new ways. As an example, Faculty 01 described their role in managing racial dynamics in student group work and then reflected, “I look back on like all the group issues that have happened, so many have racial dynamics that I can’t even believe that at some point I wasn’t tapped into that, because it’s so clear in every single instance. It’s not the same things that are happening and not the same players, but it’s alarming how actively blind I was to it before”.

3.3. Integrating These Understandings: Drivers of Faculty Pedagogical Shifts

In Figure 2, we consider all eight faculty narratives together and depict our understanding of how faculty (1) became more “experience-near” to students and people of color to varying degrees, and how this combined (in some cases) with (2) reflecting on their social position and developing critical consciousness to varying degrees to shape their pedagogy. We see the attunement to student realities and production of experience-nearness as primarily influencing faculty members’ levels of student-centeredness (a form of intentional pedagogy) while reflecting on their own social position and developing critical consciousness influenced their levels of engagement with and adoption of antiracist pedagogy. The practices stemming from these pedagogical shifts in approach exist along a spectrum with simpler teaching practices on the top and bottom and more active and intensive practices in the center of the spectrum, where student-centered and antiracist teaching converge. We do not see these as mechanistic relationships but rather as spectra along which faculty move and posit these as relationships that may be worth exploring further.

4. Discussion

This article explores how public health faculty in a public university viewed and engaged with intentional and antiracist pedagogy during 2020–2022. The narratives we collected trace out the interaction between attunement to student realities and the development of critical consciousness and thereby faculty becoming more intentional and/or antiracist in their teaching. These findings provide a new window, using oral history, for understanding what facilitated faculty members’ movement toward these practices, which we argue are critical adjustments to the way public health has historically been taught. They also provide insight into how we might broaden faculty interest in these approaches, as well as the tensions and complexities inherent in moving in these directions. Ultimately, this research helps us understand how faculty can better model and practice the societal care urgently needed to support public health, starting in the classroom.

Faculty narrators described varying levels of intimacy with students’ realities in this period, though virtually all had become more aware of students’ lives outside of the classroom. We wonder what allows some faculty to develop experience-nearness—to take on board or even invite and share personal experiences—while others do not. When present, this attunement aligns with bell hooks’ idea of “engaged pedagogy” [40]. Engaged pedagogy encourages faculty and students to “regard one another as ‘whole’ human beings” [40] (p. 14), make “connection[s] between ideas learned in university settings and those learned in life practices” [40] (p. 15), and is foundational in facilitating learning about “how to live in the world” [40] (p. 15). This invigorating conceptualization has been put to the test in the literature, where scholars indicate that the road to becoming more experience-near through sharing about our personal lives is not a direct one. There are multiple complexities, including safety, boundaries (“the boundaries of the personal in teaching contexts are not fixed” [41] (p. 342)), and maintaining connections between personal and pedagogical material [41]. In studying this, geographer Kath Browne suggests attending to the specific contexts and conditions of our teaching [41]. Sample reflection questions for instructors include: To what degree and for what reasons do some students need to connect with others in the classroom more? What can personal experience bring to this course? What will be missed without this? Furthermore, an important and related question is how faculty can develop skills to facilitate experience-near learning where appropriate, given the rarity of training in meaningfully connecting across differences, as Faculty 08 observes. We see these as urgent questions for learning environments like ours, which serve a diverse (by race/ethnicity, economics, educational and professional backgrounds, and age) student body. Rooted in this project, we have generated specific recommendations for faculty seeking to work with students’ lived experiences thoughtfully in the classroom [1].

Relatedly, we should address some of the challenges in developing critical consciousness among faculty, particularly privileged White faculty. Critical consciousness was conceptualized for oppressed people to be able to address oppression [25]. Some scholars use the term “critical pedagogy” to describe the efforts of a more privileged group of people (i.e., faculty) toward active allyship of the oppressed [28], which involves analysis of individual identities and voices and examination within the oppressors of how they can intervene for the benefit of the oppressed and challenge other oppressors to do the same [42]. This is in line with what Freire described as the “rebirth” of the oppressor. Other suggestions for modifications when building allyship with the oppressor include providing affirming examples of people and practices that are actively challenging oppression, addressing guilt, and teaching the process of love and humanizing the Other [42]. Importantly, many faculty hold intersectional identities and will not identify as the oppressor across all identities, but still hold a position of power within the classroom and have some level of privilege worthy of examination. This is work that is best done in a group setting, toward a common goal, where reflections, emotions, responsibilities, and positioning can be processed collectively, as faculty here did in the ATC (We might think of this as an extension of the individual reflective work in times of crisis, described by Lim [43]). However, without collective organizing of this type, faculty may experience challenges in individually taking up this work.

Even with this type of collective organizing taking place, such a movement can face real challenges when the crisis is perceived to be over, as the waning interest in the ATC suggests. Some narrators were among the core members of the ATC and are still actively seeking to revive it by building more popular support for valuing teaching, attunement to students, and developing critical consciousness. We are encouraged by work on social movements and community organizing that suggest that the periods when movements are perceived as a failure might be a predictable and expected phase while moving toward change (https://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/surviving-ups-downs-social-movements/, accessed on 12 July 2024). We see working with oral histories in this fallow period as a regenerative opportunity. As oral historian Amy Starecheski writes, “In periods of seeming movement decline, storytelling and history-making are essential to activist theorizing and learning, making these times productive in ways that often go unnoticed” [44]. Minor though it may be, sharing this article in progress with the narrators has kept their experiences in this period in their minds and has been a part of the reinvigorated engagements around pedagogy with some narrators (e.g., Faculty 05, the adjunct faculty member not initially involved in the ATC, now has relationships with multiple ATC members and is more engaged in pedagogy conversations at the school). We continue to actively brainstorm ways of continuing this work and intend to use ASPPH’s Framing the Future Report, with its emphasis on “inclusive excellence through an anti-racism lens”, as a point of leverage in these efforts [22].

Finally, we acknowledge an important limitation of this project, which is that what we learned is based on our self-selected sample. The narrators who chose to participate in this study were mostly on their way toward a more intentional and antiracist pedagogy, which is why they felt motivated to be a part of the research on how teaching was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 racial justice uprisings. This is reflected in the results: we were able to identify the facilitators of these teaching practices at the instructor level but not the barriers. Future research might emphasize recruiting faculty who teach regularly but who are not yet involved in moving toward intentional or antiracist pedagogy in order to more fully understand the barriers to doing so.

5. Conclusions

Schools of public health, like most educational institutions with entrenched cultures and substantial bureaucracy, face challenges in moving toward more intentional and antiracist teaching. Despite this, we see some faculty narrators in this project attempting to create healing spaces within public health classrooms, consistent with public health’s larger mission. In these spaces, faculty strive to be present with the lived experiences, suffering, joys, and needs of students while also taking account of the systemic inequities that that shape both population health and classrooms dynamics. This treats the classroom as a microcosm of society and has the potential to join faculty and students together in learning through laboratories of care [34]. Given the devaluation of teaching and the lack of strong faculty development systems in many institutions, it behooves us to pay close attention to how faculty navigate and learn in the absence of supportive resources. Our research acknowledges the work of faculty in difficult conditions and eras, as well as the limits of these efforts, and serves as a basis for imagining how much further teaching might progress—in becoming more effective, engaging, and equitable—with investments in greater training and support. We thus encourage academic institutions and accrediting bodies to create much-needed roadmaps for supporting faculty development and to build infrastructure to cultivate intentional, student-centered, and antiracist pedagogy throughout higher education.