Current events offer the perfect way to connect classroom topics to real world situations and issues. They can also create a sense of urgency and a sense of connection to students’ own lives, which helps foster student motivation and engagement.
This week:
Congress is back in session with a massive September agenda, including trying to avoid a government shutdown and a vote on whether to change the rules for confirming nominees. Plus, an effort to force the Trump administration to release more files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein goes forward.
The world is going through “Big Events”— periods of abnormal, rapid, and unpredictable global events that disrupt daily life and change norms, beliefs, and social structures (Friedman & Rossi, 2015). Previous research, primarily on HIV epidemics, suggests that these Big Events may lead to the emergence of new populations with a higher risk for disease, such as persons who inject drugs or engage in sex work, and that their effects are not deterministic: some Big Events led to outbreaks, while others did not.
This article presents a framework that is designed to help researchers understand and predict the short and long term effects of these Big Events. It lays out some hypotheses about how pre-existing societal conditions and changing (“pathway”) variables can influence outcomes; introduces innovative questionnaire-based measures that can be used to assess the impact of these Big Events; and provides suggestions for improving human capacity to anticipate, detect, and respond to them.