It’s an extremely stressful time for many Americans, including students in higher education. They need to deal with the ongoing impact of chaos on their learning through this academic year and beyond. Faculty need to adjust to their needs.
The most recent American Psychological Association Stress in America™ survey shows “62% of U.S. adults 18 and over reported societal division as a significant source of stress in their lives.” Seventy-six percent of U.S. adults say the future of the nation is a significant cause of stress.
Following the ongoing protests, arrests, disruptions and ICE killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a recent New York Times/Siena University poll says 63% of Americans disapprove of ICE tactics. Sixty-one percent say ICE has gone too far.
As a public health professor with over a decade of teaching experience, I’m deeply concerned about the ability of students in higher education to meet their learning goals in this volatile socio-political environment made intentionally chaotic by erratic and disruptive events that arise almost daily.
Eighty-seven percent of the 127 students and guests (my class is open to the public) in my graduate public health course recently responded to a poll that they feel that the current and past social, economic, and political policies and programs cause them stress or anxiety.
Chronic anxiety and stress impact all systems of the body – musculoskeletal, respiratory, cardiovascular, endocrine, gastrointestinal, nervous, and reproductive systems. These impacts result in tight shoulders, feelings of shortness of breath, occasional heartburn, nausea and headaches.
The chronic anxiety and stress about the socio-political environment today can also make people feel unsafe, making it hard to concentrate, retain information and integrate concepts. Research shows that stress and emotions have a main influence on the learning process.
In a national study, 30% of college students reported that anxiety impacted their academics. Another found that one in five college students are stressed all the time.
This is not new. During the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety and depression spiked globally, increasing 25% in two years impacting the academic performance of students. The efforts taken then need to inform action today.
In responding to the broad mental health needs, many universities, like mine, added mental health providers, created safe spaces for students and provided evidenced-based programming for students. Yet few efforts were made to encourage faculty to change their pedagogical approaches and/or their lesson plans and assessments to accommodate student learning.
When students feel unsafe and uncertain, some simple adjustments by faculty can help. Integrating efforts to deepen the relationships within the learning community in the class can allow for organic mutual support and sense of community.
This can be done by adding more interactive learning activities that allow the students to share their knowledge and expertise in a discussion-based learning process.
Integrating more breaks and reflexivity in the learning process is also helpful. Studies show, for men in particular, that students report being unable to sustain attention to a lecture longer than 20-30 minutes.
Integrating evidenced-based trauma informed approaches like mindful breathwork, taking a set of intentional collective deep breathes before learning begins, or starting class with music or storytelling is also helpful in welcoming students to the learning space.
Instructors can provide more agency and control over the assignments by inserting flexibility in the assessment process. They can allow students to choose their topics or assignments and opt out of some assignments (for instance, they can complete seven out of 12 assignments). Flexible assignment deadlines can provide students some relief when they are unable to focus.
Deeply integrating community engagement in teaching so each learning objective can be applied and experiential can also ease stress. My own research has shown this can have multiple levels of benefits.
If needed, faculty must be able to set the syllabus aside and identify a set of learning experiences that allow faculty to facilitate students learning in new and innovative ways.
For instance, in spring 2025, when ICE was sent to Chicago neighborhoods, students in my class were dealing with a high level of anxiety. My co-instructor and I put aside what we had planned and instead co-designed, as a class, a learning event called Mindful Meals to meet the learning objectives in a more trauma informed way.
This leveraged the assets of the students themselves to host a meal for the school community. Faculty, staff, students and community partners were invited to sit with us, using a World Café model.
Students demonstrated mastery of the course concepts and practiced their community engagement skills to create an environment where students could sit and reflect on the harms we are experiencing as a public health community.
One student arranged video documentation of the World Cafe, so it could inspire other teachers in other schools of public health to make critical modifications to their instruction during this difficult time.
The Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health call for transformative approaches to teaching and learning that involve diverse and inclusive learning communities to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.
Included in this changing environment is a level of chaos most have not seen before. This chaos includes the loss of funding for health equity research and programming making future public health careers uncertain.
The public health field is experiencing censorship and erasure of critical theoretical and methodologic approaches that situate health as determined by a social and political process. This is seen in federal requirements to remove words from research such as structural, systemic, political, legislation, segregation, marginalized, underrepresented, and disadvantage. This is causing disorientation, frustration and stress.
During this difficult time, it is critical for faculty and instructors across higher education to rethink their syllabi and teaching approach and deepen our connections as a learning community to adapt to the unique needs that 2026 has wrought.
In her 1994 book, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks writes, “As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.”
Jeni Hebert-Beirne, PhD, MPH is an award-winning Professor of Community Health Sciences at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project.
