Teaching and Learning: Pandemics with Jessie Dubreuil and Jonathan Kennedy

Join our host Sam Thompson as he engages in a transatlantic discussion with Jessie Dubreuil and Jonathan Kennedy on the pressing topic of teaching and learning about pandemics.

In this episode, you’ll gain insights into:

• Their enriching experiences on the Fulbright Global Challenges Teaching Award (GCTA) and its impact on students and their professional endeavors.
• The crucial role of cultural exchange and collaboration in addressing global challenges  and promoting understanding, particularly around pandemics.
• The value of adopting an interdisciplinary perspective to navigate through the complexities of public health crises.
• Strategies for extending conversations beyond academia and empowering individuals to take action in the face of pandemics.
• How their experiences have instilled optimism for the future of teaching, learning, and global cooperation.

About our speakers:

Jessie Dubreuil, Associate Director for Learning at the Teaching and Learning Centre at UC Santa Cruz, brings her expertise in writing and global health to the forefront of collaborative education initiatives.

Jonathan Kennedy, Reader in Politics and Global Health at Queen Mary University, London, sheds light on the intersection of political and social impacts on public health, enriching discussions with his sociological insights.

Both Jessie and Jonathan were among the pioneering grantees of the Fulbright Global Challenges Teaching Award (GCTA), which fosters transatlantic collaborations between US and UK higher education institutions to deliver innovative virtual exchange programs for undergraduate students.

Don’t forget to follow us on social media and visit our website www.fulbright.org.uk to learn more about what we do at the US-UK Fulbright Commission.

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Transcript

00:00:03 Sam Thompson 

Hello and welcome to the Fulbright Conversations Podcast: the show that brings together Fulbright alumni from both sides of the Atlantic to share their unique perspectives on some of the most pressing global challenges of our time. I'm your host, Sam Thompson, senior program manager at the US UK Fulbright Commission. 

Today I'm excited to be speaking with two very special guests, Jessie Dubreuil and Jonathan Kennedy. 

00:00:32 Sam Thompson 

Last year, Jessie and Jonathan were paired up as part of the inaugural full right global Challenges Teaching award focused on pandemics. This collaborative award brings together pairs of teaching faculty, one at a US higher education institution and one at a UK higher education institution, to co-deliver a virtual exchange program for undergraduates between their two universities. 

They did this using the collaborative online international learning method, also known as COIL, which is an approach that brings students and professors together across cultures to learn, discuss and collaborate as part of their class. 

00:01:07 Sam Thompson 

Jessie Dubreuil is the associate director for learning in the Teaching and Learning Centre at UC Santa Cruz. She is a faculty member in the writing programme. And at Merrill College, affiliated faculty in Global and Community Health and Faculty Fellow in UCSC’s Global Classrooms programme. 

00:01:23 Sam Thompson 

Her co-edited volume, Teaching Environmental Justice: Practices to Engage Students and Build Community was published by Edward Elgar in late 2023.  

00:01:42 Sam Thompson 

Jonathan Kennedy is a reader in Politics and Global Health at the Centre for Public Health and Policy at Queen Mary University, London. He is also the Co-deputy Director of the Centre, and in 2023 his book Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History was published by Penguin. 

00:01:47 Sam Thompson 

How are you both doing? 

00:01:48 Jessie Dubreuil 

Wonderful, Sam. Thank you for having us. 

00:01:50 Sam Thompson 

I'm really excited you were both able to join me today. You were both paired up as part of our inaugural Fulbright Global Challenges Teaching Awards focusing on pandemics, and you've now finished your collaborative online teaching awards in the past year. Can you tell us about your experiences during your Fulbright and what elements of your experience has been the most interesting or impactful for you?  

00:02:09 Jessie Dubreuil 

Absolutely. Well, I really appreciate the question. I think partly because the process of coming on board with Jonathan through the Fulbright grant and getting to know each other and what would be possible in a collaboration like this was a meaningful way to understand the potential for these kinds of collaborations and greater amplified impact on students and on student learning. 

00:02:30 Jonathan Kennedy 

And yeah, just to add to that, I think the general process of being thrust out of my comfort zone into a whole new environment, working with Jessie and her colleagues, but also people at Queen Mary University of London who I never worked with.  

Having kind of taught similar things for the last 5-6 years, it was just great to have the opportunity to reflect about what I taught and how I taught it, and to think how we could do it differently in a really supportive environment with people from different backgrounds. 

And then of course on top of that you have the whole structure of Fulbright, and the ACE, the people that we were working with that were helping us develop our core programs. And so it was just really a wonderful, exciting, really thought-provoking experience to have to think about what you've been doing in new ways and to have all these different insights being thrown at you from all sorts of experienced, passionate people. 

00:03:19 Sam Thompson 

Thinking about the COVID-19 pandemic in particular, one thing that's evident is the need for a global collaboration and within the higher education sphere is particularly study abroad and exchange is really critical in building these skills. Yet, it's often really accessible to many students. Could you tell us about how this COIL experience has impacted your students? 

00:03:37 Jonathan Kennedy 

So I think one of the reasons why I got involved was I was just super excited by the opportunity that virtual exchange or collaborative online international learning provides for students to get this international experience, to develop their intercultural communication skills. When we consider certainly the typical way of giving students international experience in the UK, it's the study abroad program. 

And this works really well for some students, certainly, and they take advantage of this and they go somewhere for a year that they wouldn't otherwise be able to go to, and they have a really great experience, and this really helps their development. 

But there's also an enormous number of students that can't take advantage of these opportunities. And this can be because of the cost of taking another year of studying, or even the opportunity cost, the fact that they won't be working that year, or perhaps they're from particular backgrounds where their parents don't want them to live away from home or to live overseas. And this is particularly pertinent at Queen Mary, because we're a university that's based in East End of London, an area that's traditionally really quite poor and still you see this in our student body. You see that there's something like 50% of our students are first generation and 25% of our students come from households where the annual income is less than £10,000. So that's less than about $12,500 a year.  

So you can imagine that quite a lot of the students at Queen Mary don't have the opportunity to take advantage of year abroad programs, so I think there's a real potential for things like COIL virtual international exchanges to open up opportunities for intercultural learning way beyond the traditional methods of exchange. 

00:05:16 Sam Thompson 

I think the statistics you shared there, particularly about how those might present barriers to your students are really eye opening about the situation that international learning can sometimes find itself in, especially because of how inaccessible it can be.  

I was thinking as well potentially about the way that your course is situated that often exchanges in UK universities are, at least thinking about 10 years ago, language courses and things like American studies were often geared up to those kind of year or semester abroad exchanges.  

But for a field like public health, does it make sense to almost have something more self-contained like a COIL course as often with medical degrees you're on a much more specific timeline? 

00:05:55 Jonathan Kennedy 

Totally from our side, because the students that were taking the COIL, taking the virtual exchange were what we call intercalating medical students. So they were medical students who take a year out of their medical studies to come and study public health. So time is really limited. And so just from a really pragmatic perspective, short exchange like this is perfect. 

00:06:17 Jessie Dubreuil 

It's really striking to hear Jonathan talk about all of the ways in which this really does bring an opportunity and a level of access to often underrepresented students in the global exchange realm, and I'm just enjoying reflecting on the fact that so many of the qualities that we sought to build into this experience that accrue, whether you're working across cultures in physical exchange or in online exchange, add up to permission and a real sense of support for the kind of risk taking and vulnerability and question posing that we perhaps sorely missed during the pandemic when we tended in quarantine and with the necessary closing down of our world scaling to sort of the home level, we missed what was most satisfying to infuse into this project, which was the opportunity to talk together and reflect together to co-create an exploration of what our lives post pandemic could mean again. 

00:07:20 Sam Thompson 

Thinking about taking that forward, how do you hope that your students who were impacted by this course will use the new interdisciplinary knowledge and new intercultural experiences that they've had, either in their future learning or in their lives, post their university education? 

00:07:36 Jessie Dubreuil 

For me, I hope they keep leaning into what can be the initial discomfort of connecting with the ‘other’. Because of what we saw students discover over and over again that there's common ground to be mined there, that there's real meaning to be made by comparing and contrasting the experiences and approaches of your local and national communities to a common earth-shaking life-changing challenge. 

00:08:03 Jonathan Kennedy 

It was a really interesting process because our students were in some respects quite different in the sense that those that QM were medical students. So for US listeners in the UK, medical students choose to study medicine when they're 18-19 and they go straight into studying their medical degree. So there's no such thing as apre-Medd student in most cases. So it was just fantastic to have this opportunity to meet certainly Jessie and also to see students who had very different lived experiences who had gone through the same kind of public health crisis and experienced many of the same things, but also in a very, very different way because of the differences in the US.  

But I think more generally it was just fantastic for our students to have the opportunity to think beyond the world of biomedical sciences. You know, so to think about diseases in a much broader context, to take a step back. One of the great things I think was my background is more in sociology.  

So I think very much about economic inequalities and how they impact health, and I think that's really important for students to think about. And then Jessie also adds all sorts of fascinating insights from her background as well, which I think really helped our students to begin to think about the problems that they see in a much more different way, a way that's much more grounded in the context that they live in. 

00:09:20 Sam Thompson 

I really want to delve into that a little bit more in terms of the educational approaches, but before I do, I just wanted to say how much I liked the idea of leaning into the discomfort of those initial interactions, because I do think that's such a really valuable part of any intercultural experience too.  

But to return to your point, Jonathan, about bringing these different perspectives together, your research typically in the past has examined political and social impacts of pandemics and other public health problems. While Jessie, you've explored the rhetoric around public health and pandemics and how we write and remember these experiences, so both of you have approached this, I think, from an angle that's not just numbers and not just the science of how and why these things happen.  

But I really want to get into why you think it's important to look at public health experiences and pandemics from such an interdisciplinary approach that goes beyond the figures and the scientific facts of the event? 

00:10:10 Jessie Dubreuil 

Well, I think partly it's tempting to answer that question by going back to a couple of key terms that Jonathan's raising. And I think that disciplinarity so often such a great scaffolding for our approach to problems can also, especially in students, early careers represent the confining structure from within which to explore big questions. 

And so when Jonathan's referencing the fact that this course not only brought together students from a variety of disciplines, but students of different ages and stages, dedicated premedical students on the path and in the case of UCSC students, largely aspiring global and Community health students in a brand new major on our campus, not necessarily decided yet in their pre health pathway, but interested in exploring the kinds of questions that might help them anchor themselves in a larger career path.  

And when they came together, what we were partly doing was reminding them that they can and should speak from a place of disciplinary expertise. 

00:11:14 Jonathan Kennedy 

Building on your comments, I think one of the most impactful sessions that we had was when we were talking about our students, experiences of lockdowns and we framed that session by talking about The WHO definition of health, not merely the absence of disease and infirmity, but a state of complete physical, social and mental well-being, pointing out that things like lockdowns during the pandemic happened to stop people getting sick from disease.  

But there were massive impacts to people's social and mental well-being, certainly, and it was really touching. Really fascinating sometimes, very sad to hear about the different experiences that our students had, and I think it was interesting as well to see them discuss those things. 

00:11:58 Jessie Dubreuil 

Drawing on the world of experiential and problem-based learning as we did, I appreciated the potential to really center students’ collaborative learning on the real-world problems and responses that came to them. I think it was exactly that kind of knowledge, the sort of home fund of knowledge that let them experiment and explore, take risks with frameworks for understanding this that they might not have without the wide-ranging course materials and their lived experiences of COVID built in. And students brought knowledge of the scientific, historical, and policy frameworks to the conversation and made those and considered them together. 

But I think what felt most novel was that first-hand experience was elevated alongside the contextualizing background that we were bringing in from experts across disciplines. 

00:12:46 Jonathan Kennedy 

It was really interesting from my perspective as someone who's read during the pandemic enormous amounts about the different policy responses in different parts of the world, and you hear about what happened in the US, particular policy choices that made the pandemic perhaps worse than it had to be and the impact that various forms of inequality had on the pandemic. You know, it was really hard hitting to hear people's personal experience of that and to add colour and add flavour to the facts and the figures that we heard about during the pandemic. So I think that was really, really a kind of worthwhile part of the exchange.  

And of course, when we were going through the whole training program, we're told that that's the first level, this back and forth of information and experience, but certainly well I guess for our students, but also for ourselves, who've been through this deadly devastating pandemic, it was a very useful process just to be able to talk through it with people from another culture and to see how our experiences were similar and in some respects different. 

00:13:40 Sam Thompson 

I think that experiential side and as you say, speaking to someone of another culture is a really key part of what makes this exchange interesting beyond the academia of it, if you will. And that you did get to talk through individual experiences from different communities. And I wondered if you could talk about how the experience of the pandemic and its impact on community differed so much in the two different contexts that you're working in the US and the UK. 

00:14:05 Jessie Dubreuil 

Well, I think as we pick up on that, and as preparation for picking up on that, I did want to flag how important it was that the way we prepared to work with students was its own kind of experiential learning. It was by working together toward a shared goal, but from the perspective of different cultural experiences of the recent pandemic, and one of the challenges that was so welcome in that context was to adapt our own curricular materials and resources to better interlock with each other. 

To me, that really amounted to making space, and I think I've carried that lesson with me in further pedagogical innovations and goals for my curriculum is that we were, by necessity and also through the encouragement of this program, asked to make space for student voices for the unexpected in places that really bore fruit. 

00:15:00 Jessie Dubreuil 

Moment where one might reasonably have expected to find students talking about very different interactions with the medical system or the policy choices that were being deployed in our various countries often surfaced commonalities that were heart wrenchingly similar and the one that came up early on in the course that will always stick with me is that of mental health, and students real disclosure sharing about what the pandemic had meant to them in terms of mental health, feelings of isolation, feelings of loneliness, and the level on which it had taught them to invest in human connection and family connection, which might not previously have been high on their list of basic needs. 

00:15:46 Jonathan Kennedy 

When we were first paired together, I imagined that Santa Cruz and East London were so different. It might be difficult to get our students to think on the same page, but even when we were brainstorming, we came to realize that despite the fact there are an enormous number of differences between the two sites, there's also some incredible similarities fact. In East London, we're really quite a poor area that's in the shadow of the great City of London. And so it's really clear. You just have to walk around the streets to feel the inequality between the local population and the people working so close by.  

And it's also similar in Santa Cruz in some respects, right. It's in the shadow of Silicon Valley. And this kind of engine of enormous wealth creation, but actually a lot of the people, as far as I understand that go to UC Santa Cruz, they're from pretty humble backgrounds. 

00:16:29 Jessie Dubreuil 

I think, Jonathan, that's exactly right. And despite the difference in our context, the pastoral coastal California, largely agricultural and Redwood forested land, and the urban Greater London context nonetheless gave us the opportunity to talk about people experiencing homelessness approaching and through and post pandemic. 

I think that a lot of our students at UC Santa Cruz are very interested in making sure that they bring the questions and challenges of their own home communities into the classroom and talking about ways that they can have an impact on areas of need when they leave that classroom and rejoin the world of work and further study. 

00:17:07 Jonathan Kennedy 

If you look at statistics, you know you see clearly that in the UK, people from Bangladeshi backgrounds are likely to contract COVID at higher rates, were more much likely if they contracted COVID to get very, very sick and die. And I think it's similar in the US with other communities like the African American community and the Native American community. So were these really quite uncanny similarities, but then also, there were some very interesting things to hear our students discuss.  

And both from the US and the UK perspective, just to understand how the different health systems in our two countries are structured...it was really an important experience for all our students. Because again, you can read about the NHS, and you can read about the health system in the US, and you can read about the problems with both and perhaps the positive side of both. But to hear personal experiences of how people are impacted by the structure of the health systems is really kind of interesting. And again, there was some pretty horrible stories from what I remember. 

00:18:01 Jessie Dubreuil 

Isn't that actually one of the things that impacted our practice, not just reflecting back or thinking about how we might iterate on this project, but in real time being able to hear how the questions we were invested in asking produced answers in our students that were very productive for digging in further to the discussion and bringing it home in a way that reading about it never could. 

00:18:24 Jonathan Kennedy 

Exactly. And I think there are some surprises for me as well, because I remember when we were planning, we were working on the assumption that because the emphasis on individual freedom is so much greater in the US compared to the UK, that we got to discussing things like vaccines and vaccine mandates that we might have some disagreement. But it was actually quite interesting how I don't think we really did. 

00:18:42 Jessie Dubreuil 

I love what you're saying there though, because I think it connects to how a consciously rhetorical approach to these discussions with students basically meant directing our close attention together to terms like blame and responsibility. You know, community and care. 

And basically to arguments and enduring topics that take different shapes in different communities and contexts. And I feel as though what our combined courses valued was in part the informed and authentic conversation between student stakeholders who were being invited to build deep contextual knowledge awareness around pandemics and public health, and also the stories - the lived experiences of their close colleagues across an ocean.  

I think what was also interesting to see evolve as the course went on were alignments that actually didn't necessarily track with geographic location. Students across classes who had shared experiences of limited health access or a real desire to change pathway to a certain kind of public health experience. They definitely cross pollinated in ways that you couldn't choreograph ahead of time because it mattered who was in the room and how they learned to understand their own contexts together. 

00:20:06 Jonathan Kennedy 

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Cause it forces us as the conveners and facilitators to question our own assumptions. And that's an interesting part of it as well. And I think what was interesting and fun was that we broke the class up into, was it 5 or 6 much smaller groups? Just to see how the different dynamics emerge.  

It was a bit- well maybe not, maybe it wasn't easier for me because I was basically physically based in the Garrard building, which is one of the buildings in our Whitechapel campus, and I booked out several smaller rooms for our groups to go into so I could walk around and see the different ways in which they engaged, and even in terms of things like the technology they used in their groups, really different.  

So some groups immediately went onto WhatsApp, whereas others basically huddled around a computer talking on Zoom or on Teams. So it was interesting to see how things went off in different directions and different groups as well. 

00:20:58 Jessie Dubreuil 

OK, that's so true. And really was so interesting too. As an evolution of our role, I think that it goes to the fact that we were designing an experience that we hoped would make perspective taking a habit by repetition and by building comfort with these conversations where students didn't always know where they were going to locate themselves.  

We were asking them to take a risk and to enter the room without a preconceived notion of where the conversation would go. And so our job became one of scaffolding and of facilitation, and that decentered the instructor persona perhaps, I think, productively reduced our prominence as speakers in the interest of bringing those student voices actively into the meaning-making activity in those rooms, Zoom rooms, physical rooms, where they got to know each other and create a response. I think it was empowering.  

We posed this as a pandemic simulation with the idea that giving students a problem - hopefully not too traumatic a problem having just emerged from a real live pandemic that was no simulation. And we were overt about this, knowing that we were pretty close to an experience that might be hard to step away from and view from a more theoretical critical perspective.  

We help them to think about what they had learned, to reflect on the teachings of their observations and experiences and to direct them toward the goal of nuance. A wiser, productive approach to problems like this that might emerge in their futures. And so I think that far from traumatizing them, we were, I hope, offering a chance for them to band together and make use of the things they had learned. 

00:22:47 Jonathan Kennedy 

Something that I really liked about the way we set things up there was a big part of it that was focused on personal reflection and thinking about what we went through. But there was also this attempt to really get the students to think through what can be done in the case of future pandemics, to make their impact much less dangerous.  

And so I think we covered both the critical reflection side, but also the creative problem-solving side of things to really try to encourage students to realize that although politicians and policy makers in the UK and the US might not have taken the best choices during the mass pandemic certainly possible to have a very strong, effective response to a pandemic that doesn't have to cause the kind of death and destruction that the last one did. 

00:23:31 Jessie Dubreuil 

I think that's so right. And you're also talking about empowering a conversation that feels more positive and productive. One of the things we've definitely seen in the classroom sort of through and post-pandemic has been questions about maintaining student motivation. Right? And when we talk about asking for these engagements in students educational lives, in the relationships they're building with others, it feels really meaningful that they would be asked to create meaning that resonated for them.  

And the longer I teach, the more it strikes me how vast a resource the students seated around the table are to one another and to this endeavor in which we are engaged. And so surfacing those assets for them and inviting them to exchange them and to create the body of knowledge they'll need to meet these global challenges felt really right. 

00:24:23 Jonathan Kennedy 

Yeah. And I think we had good fun doing it as well. So as Jessie said, there was a simulated pandemic. So every week there would be kind of different things happening with the pandemic and students in their group would have to respond and provide information in different forms. And the conceit was that there was this deputy director at The WHO and she wanted all this information. But she was far too busy to just read reports, so that kind of created a space where we could get students to use all sorts of different methods to send information to this fictional deputy director.  

So we did video interviews one week. Another week it was a poster. All these different skills that students had to collaborate on, I think that was really a very worthwhile aspect of the whole project. 

That was interesting as well because I think there were certainly teething problems with getting the students to interact that we can improve on next time we run this kind of thing. But it was really fun for us to design this syllabus, but also really interesting to see how it unfolds. 

00:25:23 Jessie Dubreuil 

That's right. And you talk about how you prepare the ground for students to jump in and be vulnerable with each other. When we were thinking about this idea of a multi week simulation, we wanted to create a cohort feeling that enabled students to build rapport and to deepen their sense of the shared values and motivations of their collaborators. We had looked to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Health Security model. They have a couple of tabletop exercises around pandemic response: one called Clade X, and one, Event 201. 

And a tabletop exercise just stages a meeting to discuss a simulated emergency situation. But I think what appealed to us about the format was that it uses a low stress environment that requires very little beyond a kind of sense of empathy and a willingness to evaluate the context for a given problem you're trying to solve to get students willing and active engaged in a conversation.  

So we wanted students to challenge themselves and others to really understand where they would be coming from and what values motivated decisions and engagements in a larger policy or planning world that they will very soon have not just a choice but really an obligation to join. 

00:26:49 Sam Thompson 

I suppose changing tack slightly. Whilst the peak of the pandemic is over, many of the social impacts of COVID-19 are still present in our lives, in our communities. I suppose this is something that you would have both talked about with your students, but asked them to think about and their own responses, either to the simulated pandemic or to the pandemic. And these are things like societal experiences of loss and trauma, that mental health and isolation piece that you spoke to earlier, and the rise in conspiracy rhetoric.  

So as we emerge from COVID, and it feels odd to say that even the increase in hospitalizations at the time of speaking, what do you think that we've learned and how do we ensure that these lessons aren't forgotten? 

00:27:30 Jonathan Kennedy 

So I think one major thing to consider is how we view the world in a really kind of fundamental way. So to me it seems like in many ways we're still stuck in the days of the Old Testament. You know, if you go back to Genesis and supposedly God created humans in his own image and then gave us Dominion over the natural world over the land, the seas and all the animals and fish. And still we think very much in this way. But what the pandemic has shown us is that actually the world isn't this kind of stage where humans play out their roles and the natural world is just some blank canvas.  

Actually, we're living in part of a much bigger system, an ecosystem, and if we're going to live successfully on this planet, humans really have quite a minor role to play in this system. And so coming to terms with that and realizing that the pandemic wasn't something that happened out of the blue.  

It's actually- when you look at the fact that there's more humans living on the planet than ever before, we're increasingly encroaching on animal habitats, the manner in which we are factory farming on an absolutely industrial scale, and the ease with which one can travel between distant parts of the world...this all combines to create a new Golden Age for infectious diseases. So although COVID is waning, hopefully, I think we have to prepare ourselves for the fact that it might not actually be that long until the next pandemic comes along.  

We have to really focus on how we can build a society and a world that is resilient to the challenges that are going to occur in the next few decades. 

00:28:59 Jessie Dubreuil 

Yeah, I really love that, Jonathan. And I love the emphasis on resilience. I think that working in this way with students who've seen so much, but also have so much of hope to share about the future, you realize that one of the big takeaways for me is more about process, and if these students and others like them take away from an experience like this, not the code book or the answer to the next pandemic, but a way of thinking about the systems and the structures that define their local experience and the experiences of their peers, colleagues, global partners around the world, they'll be better prepared to weather whatever storms lie ahead.  

And I think that watching students build that toolkit for themselves is incredibly empowering. I think it's a reason to invest in COIL/virtual exchange elements in unexpected places. Because no matter where you plug in these conversations, they elevate and empower. They help people name the skills that we hope they'll apply not just in their academic life, but everywhere. 

00:30:10 Sam Thompson 

Such a positive take away, I think from this educational experience about a crisis. And as we said earlier, global public health requires global collaboration to build global solutions both on our macro level but also on a community level. So beyond the things that you just expressed, what is it that makes you feel optimistic about this and how do you see opportunities for listeners to get involved in work like this? 

00:30:34 Jonathan Kennedy 

So I guess the way that we set this up as an interdisciplinary transdisciplinary project, I think really emphasize the fact that infectious disease outbreaks, pandemics aren't just about the virus. They're about the fact that certain societies create conditions that allow pandemics to spread and to wreak chaos and to wreak death.  

And the flip side of that is we don't just have to lie down and take whatever the next pandemic is going to throw at us. Actually, the realization that social political economic factors are really important in whether or not a society is resilient in the face of a pandemic actually empowers us, because it means that we can build communities. We can build societies that are much stronger, much healthier, and will be much better placed to deal with global challenges that Fulbright is interested in, whether that's pandemics or our colleagues, another pair worked on climate change, which is another really concerning and related issue. 

But I think this realization that by building a more equal healthy society allows us to be more resilient to pandemics is really a positive way to think about it and it gives us a lot of power to deal with the problems as they come. 

00:31:44 Jessie Dubreuil 

I think that's right, and we really didn't forget at any point when we were trying to bring these groups of students together that we were coming out of a moment when we couldn't travel, we couldn't connect.  

And really reflecting on that and resisting the very natural instinct to close down, to batten down the hatches both for health reasons and just emotionally as a response to this kind of global crisis, and instead really learn how to listen better, to kind of open windows and doors on other peoples suffering on other people's approaches on other peoples mistakes and insights as a way of deepening our own practice. Not just as academics, but as human beings.  

And I think that our students, perhaps with some reluctance initially, ultimately taught us wonderful lessons about showing up for the unknown. Curricular experiments like this require instability on your way to finding your voice with a new set of interlocutors.  

And so, they brought their whole selves to the conversation with each other and they showed up for each other. And I think that teaches us just how valuable a reasonably small amount of time committed to shoring up our habits of connectedness and empathy and open engagement can do. 

00:33:08 Sam Thompson 

Thank you. Are there any resources that you'd like to share with our listeners if they'd like to learn more about this area? 

00:33:14 Jonathan Kennedy 

I guess they could always read our books. 

00:33:16 Sam Thompson 

I think that would be a fantastic place to start. 

00:33:18 Jessie Dubreuil 

I was thinking about that question and wishing in a way that I knew of more formats for encouraging conversation of this type. Because while it's tempting to say that we covered it all, you know, I think what our students left really committed to continuing to engage is a sense of cross cultural discussion of these questions. So places to open out into conversation with each other are the things that I know that I'm hoping to direct my students to. 

00:33:51 Sam Thompson 

Thank you both so much for your time today. I've really enjoyed listening to you and getting to talk with you about this. I think one of the things that's been really apparent in this conversation is that this is one of those moments that makes education such as special area to work in because it feels like the experience you had was not just one of teaching, but of doing a great deal of learning, whether that was from each other or a new form of pedagogy, or from indeed your students as well, which just seems like such an incredible experience to have had. 

00:34:21 Jonathan Kennedy 

Thank you for having us and that's always a real pleasure to listen to Jessie. I always learned so much from talking to her and hearing what she has to say. So yeah, thanks to both of you. 

00:34:30 Jessie Dubreuil 

Oh, likewise Jonathan. And really leaving the conversation today and the whole experience with a sense of gratitude for the chance to be connected and the chance to continue in dialogue and relationship in such a special way. 

00:34:47 Sam Thompson 

That brings us to the end of episode three of our Fulbright Conversations series on global challenges. Don't forget to subscribe or follow us on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. 

You can learn more about the global challenges teaching awards by visiting our website www.fulbright.org.uk, and you can stay up to date with everything we're up to at the US-UK Fulbright Commission by following us on social media. 

I'm Sam Thompson. Join us next time when we'll be discussing Media and Misinformation.