News . Best Practices The historical context of epidemics and pandemics (Best Practice Brazil)

CARE: Students were involved in the discussion about the COVID-19 contingency plan and sought to understand the historical, social, and cultural context of epidemics and pandemics. The participants were 180 students, aged between 14 and 17, from the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades of high school, with 162 of them having completed the scientific actions, their family members, a teacher, a researcher, and a scientist who shared their concerns about COVID-19. and ideas to reduce transmission supported by the Brazilian Federal Declaration of human and citizen rights and duties. Together with family members, students sought to understand and collected information from bibliographic sources about what would be epidemics and pandemics, their differences, in which societies this phenomenon has already happened, when and why. They also sought to raise causes and effects in the social context in different bibliographic sources, especially the ethical challenges of health, economics, politics, and human rights that have become relevant points in decision-making.

KNOW:  In the classroom, the students shared the previous information gathered for the elaboration of a timeline, with spatial location, elaboration of concepts and debates, among other activities. In relation to knowledge, in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary way, the integration of the disciplines of History and Geography in the analysis of historical and scientific data was developed. In this way, it was possible to understand the epidemics and pandemics in the timeline, as well as the location in the geographic space. Knowing when, where and how the historical facts happened in the world was fundamental.

As skills, the student’s ability to contextualize the historical facts of the past was developed to understand the present, as well as predict new alternatives for the future that could solve other pandemics; another skill was to reflect on responsible decision-making with ethics, empathy and their social and cultural relationships.

Due to these actions in the teaching-learning process, it was observed as attitudes, the valorization of historical records for new approaches to knowledge; the possibilities that new forms of learning, in times of a pandemic, promote in social and ethical relationships and respect for life, as well as the promotion of empathy to overcome the “chaos” caused by epidemics and pandemics, through acquired knowledge.

DO: Students were involved in the following activities:

• Analyze the history of epidemics and pandemics on the timeline with the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Location on maps of countries where some epidemics have emerged;
• Identify differences and similarities between communicable diseases of the past and the pandemic in the 21st century.
• Reading of material available in texts, videos and the book “The history of humanity told by viruses”, written by Stefan Cunha Ujvari;
• Analysis of scientific articles on the social, moral and ethical relationship during pandemic periods;
• Classroom debate on the topic;
• Elaboration of concept maps;
• Documentaries relating to the history of epidemics;
• Posters or panels with elements referring to pandemics;
• Exhibition of the historical study with performance of the main epidemics and pandemics that haunted humanity.

FINDINGS: The open scenario methodology used was project-based collaborative learning. Students brought their own questions, discussed with the scientists and their families. Teachers found the open teaching activity useful for the Contextualization of the Brazilian Federal Declaration with the pandemic highlighting human and citizen rights and duties.

OUTCOMES: The integration of the school curriculum with scientific action enabled new teaching and learning practices whose adaptations served to improve the development of learning and teaching. School curriculum and scientific action complement each other. The New High School made possible several innovations in the school curriculum and in the form of planning that allows teachers to gather by areas of knowledge, which facilitates the planning of actions, the applicability of learning activities, the use of technological resources and curricular interaction based on integrated projects.

The performance presented by the students showed mastery of content on the history of epidemics and pandemics. They embraced the idea and placed themselves as the main character in the story: the different viruses. In this way, the activity instigated and motivated the study as something peaceful and fun.

However, the social distance caused by the pandemic caused many disruptions in the school routine, many changes, which, for example, contacted scientists impossible. The return of face-to-face classes with 50% of the students reduced the time for carrying out the learning activities.

Find out more here: Our report.