In December 2019, the world was overwhelmed by the highly infectious Coronavirus. New York City was hit especially hard in March 2020 and was the epicenter of the pandemic for the U.S. with the greatest number of deaths and hospitalizations in those first months. We learned quickly that the virus can make anyone sick, but it is most dangerous for those with disproportionately more underlying conditions and health challenges like the elderly, poor, and People of Color (POC). Coronavirus highlighted how these vulnerable groups tend to have less access to healthcare in general. Then, a significant decrease in daily hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19 in early summer 2020 coincided with the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man by White police officer, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis. Chauvin was photographed looking straight at the camera unabashedly, with his knee in Floyd’s neck. Protests erupted around the country putting a focus on inequality and injustice. How do those who suffered loss and grief want to commemorate their experience, their losses and their resilience, the future, and the past?

The overlapping crises of public health and police brutality prompted me to think about trauma-informed pedagogy as a way to both grieve the losses and celebrate resilience. Pedagogy should be based on helping students understand how the content they are learning and methods with which they are engaging in their coursework, especially in the humanities, help them conceptualize the social challenges we face, and to envision life-improving social justice solutions. The collaborative project called “From Pandemic to Protest: We Remember,” can be viewed on the BMCC Open Lab. It was designed to provide students with an opportunity to reflect on the events of 2020-2021, using digital tools to commemorate the experiences of their communities during the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial-justice protests. In lockdown, we wanted the project to build community virtually through group projects that activated students’ imaginations and collaboration skills.

My communications studies students learned about the historical, social, cultural, and political roles of monuments, memorials, and commemorative events in the US and other countries. We primarily focused on the varied ways that people remember and honor the pandemic and those lost to police violence. They learned about contested histories and marginalized narratives. And they had the opportunity to learn augmented reality technology and use it to collaboratively design virtual memorials that honor their experiences of the previous year. Augmented reality superimposes a computer-generated image on the material world that appears to be in 3D. For example, the memorial that opened this blog post (here in 2D) titled “20Twenty Tunnel Vision” honors the many things we saw in the fall of 2020 including “Fearless Girl” wearing a N95 mask, George Floyd, and a protester with a Black Lives Matter sign in the ubiquitous subway tunnel. Many more can be seen in exhibit on the Open Lab site.

These virtual monuments were created to memorialize and to make meaning out of the pivotal shared experiences that defined 2020. They enabled their creators and viewers to both look back at what happened and look ahead to imagine how we will remember this period. The creations are snapshots of moments in time. Some of them were created shortly after the radical mourning and rebirth of the May – August protests and in the dark days of the winter as COVID cases rose. Others reflect the exhaustion and the optimism of spring 2021 when there was a vaccine, COVID cases were down, and we began to take off our masks. They are a window into their experiences facing innumerable challenges and still trying to meet their educational needs, searing into our memories some of the moments that defined those first 15 months.

Note: A version of this post can be found in Memory in the Moment: Augmented Reality as Opportunity for Students to Memorialize Their Experiences of the Pandemic, Racism and Injustice, and Citizenship by Jill Strauss and Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan in the Fall 2021 Bringing Theory to Practice Newsletter.