Education as "Mental Vaccine:" Designing Educational Materials About COVID-19

ABSTRACT

This brief chapter is about a statewide project to create educational materials that now have two complementary goals to help teachers deliver classes that meet new Michigan social studies standards, and to help students learn about COVID-19. The first part of the project was underway before the pandemic began, but (like most educational-development activity) it was complicated by COVID-related lockdown rules, remote-learning efforts, and budget problems. This chapter has examples and brief descriptions of five separate but related efforts a preliminary "stop-gap” lesson about COVID-19, a program to review online materials about the disease, some COVID-19 insertions into curriculum units that are currently being developed and tested, a lesson that uses an existing graphic organizer to put COVID-19 into context with other historic pandemics, and a framework for a COVID-knowledge discussion platform. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.