Course Syllabus

Navigating Identity and COVID-Related Stress for Educators: Building Racial Literacy and Pandemic Agility Syllabus

Dr. Sharon M. Ravitch
September 2020 | University of Pennsylvania

This University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education syllabus is for the course (EDUC 545) titled Navigating Identity and COVID-Related Stress for Educators: Building Racial Literacy and Pandemic Agility. This course focuses on helping educators to develop and enact humanizing pedagogies that support students and communities in the midst of COVID-19 and civil strife. The course is structured to actively engage students in a supportive inquiry community that critically examines the complex relationships between society, ideology, axiology, epistemology, and pedagogy. The goal of the course is for future educators to understand the possibilities, realities, and limitations of schooling in the United States given the radical flux of sociopolitical and socioeconomic realities. Flux pedagogy is central to the course’s curriculum, which requires taking an equity- and justice-focused stance that includes: (1) inquiry as stance, (2) trauma-informed care, (3) radical compassion and radical self-care, (4) responsive and humanizing pedagogy, (5) critical pedagogy, (6) racial literacy, and (7) brave space pedagogy.

Program and Curricular Materials