Today was absolutely the hardest day to teach out of all of my decades of teaching. I have a class of about 150 nursing students for a course on community/public health nursing. They are a very diverse group in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender, and even age. Today’s topics were cultural humility and the social determinants of health equity. How appropriate. One of my students also pointed out to me how helpful it was that I had also assigned a training module on disaster preparedness, which included PTSD prevention. She found the content helpful in terms of facing the outcome of our national presidential election. This made me remember the highly effective CDC Zombie Apocalypse disaster preparedness public education videos and materials. There is a zombie-like mindset within our healthcare system, within academic nursing, and within our society that I find highly disturbing. It would be so much easier to just yield to zombie ways.
I take diversity seriously in my teaching and strive to promote a class climate of respect for all differences, including different political views. But the profession of nursing as a whole, and especially of community/public health nursing, is built on the value of social justice and health equity. And higher education at a public university is based on inclusion and social justice. To now have a president-elect whose political platform included openly racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and beyond-misogynistic-into-sexual-assault-on-women values, takes us—takes me as a teacher—into an entirely new and uncharted territory.
Today in class I tried to acknowledge this in a transparent and respectful way—and to emphasize our responsibility to do our part to make the world, to make our country and our community a better and healthier place. We had terrific trainers from the NW Network of Bi, Trans, Lesbian, and Gay survivors of abuse who helped us address some of these issues directly. And a group of nursing students are continuing a Knitting for Change community group, an idea my UW Study Abroad in New Zealand students brought back with them last year. My co-teacher for that program was the community empowerment “Neighbor Power” expert Jim Diers. And then after class today I received notification of this recent mention I made in a Seattle-area community event of the New Zealand concept of community cafes as places to help strengthen our communities. “Experts offer ideas to help Seattle area’s homeless youth” by Neal Morton (Seattle Times, November 9, 2016).
I choose to hold on to all of these examples of the goodness and compassion in the world. I choose hope and a renewed energy to work for a socially just society.
JOSEPHINE ENSIGN 