How Ohio schools teach COVID, 6 years later

The big picture: Early research suggests K-12 textbooks are presenting the pandemic in fragmented ways, avoiding deeper questions about its causes and consequences.

• Meanwhile, kids who lived through it are now the teens in high school history classrooms, bringing their own lived, nuanced experiences into lessons.

Between the lines: The 1918 flu pandemic isn't specifically mentioned in Ohio's social studies learning standards or model curriculum, though "pandemic diseases" are listed among the "social and political challenges of a globalized world."

• That means how COVID is taught can vary significantly from district to district, Ohio Council for the Social Studies board member Elijah Fenwick-Sanders tells Axios.

Zoom in: Fenwick-Sanders, a Cincinnati-area history teacher, says he doesn't treat COVID as a finished chapter. Instead, it's a reference point.

• He begins the school year discussing recent events, to anchor students in the present, before visiting earlier periods of U.S. history.
• That lens helps students draw parallels — and in some ways, make sense of their "collective trauma," he says.

What he's saying: "The answers weren't clear in their time, just like they may not be clear in ours," Fenwick-Sanders says. "We're still in the first draft of history."