IAS faculty member Becca Price spent fall and winter of 2019/20 supporting a team of postdoctoral scholars as they developed biology seminar courses to teach at UW Bothell and at UW Seattle for spring of 2020. These beginning instructors had to quickly change their approach to teaching in the face of the emotional crises of that spring and the sudden shift to remote teaching.
Price and the instructors published a paper, "Pandemic-Related Instructor Talk: How New Instructors Supported Students at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic," exploring how they supported students during the crises of spring 2020 by analyzing everything they said that was related to the pandemic. They found that they spent about 5 minutes of each class talking to students about how they were coping with the pandemic, with the sudden shift to online teaching, what they were dreaming about doing when the pandemic ended, among other topics. Throughout, the instructors emphasized positive coping mechanisms and self-care.