Focus Carolina: Transcripts 4 - The Well : The Well

Focus Carolina: Jeff Greene 1

Provost Blouin

Welcome to Focus Carolina, an exclusive program sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m Provost Bob Blouin and I’m excited to share this series of interviews with our Carolina faculty here on WCHL.

Voiceover

Dr. Jeff Greene’s research at the School of Education focuses on how students learn in digital environments. While the internet is a valuable resource, Dr. Greene believes students need to have a plan for how to use it effectively so they can be critical thinkers and check to ensure online sources are reliable. Dr. Greene studies the effectiveness of learning techniques and how the modern student puts those techniques to use.

Greene

One of the big challenges about learning online is that there’s so much information and so many information sources. And that’s kind of a new problem for humans. Before this, humans had access to a kind of curated sources, right? So there were teachers or there were journalists or there were adults around that would say, read these things, not those things. The Internet opens all that up. And it’s a new challenge for us to figure out what do I pay attention to?

What should I not pay attention to do, what voices should I listen to or not? And that’s what I study. I study how to help people make better decisions about how to learn online when there’s just so much they could be learning. Surprisingly, people aren’t necessarily very good at understanding how they learn. Now, some students are lucky for whatever reason. They get through primary and secondary education and they’ve been pretty successful. And they haven’t had to think very carefully about how they learn.

But usually sometime in college, they start to struggle. And in that moment when you can really reach them and you can say, OK, the things that you’ve been doing before haven’t been working. So let’s talk about some research on the science of learning. What we know is an effective way of learning and see if we can get you to adopt those strategies and take on those dispositions. And it’s really when the student’s ready for it that we’re able to best reach them.

And just about every student, whether it’s in elementary school, high school, college, at some point every student goes, oh, wait, this is harder than I thought. What I was doing before isn’t working. Whether it was highlighting or just reading the chapter or whatever the case may be. There’s usually a moment where they go, OK. This isn’t working out the way it was supposed to. And then we can talk about the science of learning and help them use more effective strategies.

The good news is that most students recognize that it’s helpful. And like I said, people aren’t necessarily very good at understanding how they learn. But you can learn how to learn. It’s not rocket science. It takes some practice, it takes some support, it takes some time. But people can learn to be more effective learners. People get good at what they do. So the more time that we spend playing games online or reading social media online, that’s the less time we spend learning and focused on learning.

And so I don’t know that there’s any clear evidence of a direct relationship between time spent online and lack of attention or inability to pay attention. But the more time we spend doing things other than learning for school or for a career, the less time we spend learning for school or career. It’s a problem. And so I’m not a big advocate of parents or adults taking technology away from students. I think we need to teach students how to use technology more effectively and learn how to control it.

Voiceover

Dr. Greene believes the age-old practice of cramming for exams is the wrong way to prepare for a test.

Greene

There are some kind of fundamental strategies that we know worked really well. One strategy is spacing out your learning. So a lot of students like to cram. They like to wait until the night before the exam and they spend five hours studying. And that can work OK for memorizing information, but not for kind of a higher order thinking we want students to do. It’d be a much more effective use of their time to spend one hour studying every night, five nights before the exam rather than just five hours the night before the exam.

That’s called spaced practice. Another thing that people don’t necessarily think about or know is that it’s much more effective to test yourself than it is to re-read information. So making flashcards, old school, writing down a question on one side and the answer another side and just using those flashcards. That’s a much more effective way of learning and remembering information than just rereading the same chapter or same notes over and over again. People don’t always take the time to reflect upon what did I do before that test?

How did it go? Was did I get the outcome I wanted? If not, what could I do differently? And that’s what we help students do. We help them kind of take notice of what they’re doing. Determine whether it’s helping them reach goals. And then if not, we provide them other options that we think might help them reach their goals more effectively. We can get them to reorient. And part of that is Sunday night making a plan for the week. What I need to do? How can I set a time to do that?

Provost Blouin

Thank you for listening to Focus Carolina, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To hear more interviews, visit chapelboro.com and click on WCHL on-demand or visit unc.edu.

Focus Carolina: Jeff Greene 2

Provost Blouin

Voiceover

Greene

Learning is hard. I mean, learning’s effortful and it takes energy and time. And some people are lucky enough to kind of have a chemistry where they can study for eight hours straight with no breaks. Those people are pretty rare. Most of us can study for 50 minutes and then we need kind of a five or 10 minute break. Just get up and walk around and maybe get something to eat. But taking some breaks, then getting back to it can help us sustain longer periods of studying.

Try to think about something else. Try to walk around and kind of let your mind wander a little bit. Very often when we tell students to test themselves with those flashcards, we actually tell them to do that after that 10 minute break. It seems to be better test of whether they’ll actually know something later. If you test yourself right after you learn it, it’s not as predictive of whether you’ll know it later than if you kind of give yourself that 10 minute break.

Parents and students alike have some misconceptions about learning. Very often we don’t really understand how we learn very well. One popular misconception about learning is multitasking. Very often we think that today’s students are very good at multitasking because we see them seemingly doing a bunch of things at once. In fact, none of us are good at multitasking. It just is not something humans do. Humans do one thing at a time very well, consciously. So students that are working on a paper and then get a text and then go back to work in the paper.

They’re not multitasking. They’re single tasking and they’re switching between tasks. And every time you switch, you get a little distracted. It takes you a little longer to gonna to get caught back up. And so I’ve actually heard some parents say, well, my child has to multitask to learn. No, they don’t. That’s actually a bad idea. It’s much better to try to focus on one thing at a time. Another very common misconception that parents and students have is learning styles. And learning styles is this belief that each of us has a particular way that we best receive and understand information. So some people think that they’re visual learners; they like to see things. And people think they’re auditory learners; they best hear things. There’s lots and lots and lots of empirical evidence to show that that’s not true. That, in fact, we all learn best in multiple ways. So if I hear about something and if I see it, if I practice it myself, that’s the best way I learn in all those different ways.

But students and parents get told that a student is a visual learner and then the students narrow themselves. They say, well, the only way for me to learn is visually. And so I’ve had students in my class on the first day walk up to me and say, Professor Greene, I’ll come to a lecture because I have to. But I’m a visual learner and I don’t really learn in an auditory way. So I’m going to sit in the back and just I’ll be quiet.

I won’t bother anybody. But I’m not going to really pay much attention. And that’s that’s a lost opportunity. That’s a misconception that’s actually hurting them in terms of learning. So lots of parents and teachers get told that learning styles are a thing. They’re not.

Voiceover

Dr. Greene says UNC students are fortunate to have so many learning resources on campus.

Greene

The reality is that we all learn best when we can experience information and ideas in multiple ways we can really work with them and understand them. That’s how we learn. It’s not just one way or another. The University of North Carolina’s very fortunate to have received a great deal of federal funding to help understand how to help support first generation college students. And there’s a variety of initiatives on campus that really help us better understand the strengths that they bring and help them leverage those strengths and also understand the things that they might need some help with, whether it’s individual coaching to help them understand how college works, nuances of college all the way to helping them understand the science of learning and how to learn more effectively.

Some students, wherever reason, are lucky enough to have been exposed to good study strategies. Other students haven’t been so fortunate. And it’s a real disadvantage. But the good thing is we can provide those supports to students and then they can be very, very successful. So it helps us figure out, OK, who might need some information about learning, who might need some information about how to make connections on campus, and then we can deliver that help in ways that help them be more successful.

Provost Blouin

Thank you for listening to Focus Carolina, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To hear more interviews, visit chapelboro.com and click on WCHL on-demand or visit unc.edu.

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Jeff Greene 2

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

For the first time in our lives, we’re all facing the need to stay at home for weeks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In this special edition of Focus Carolina, Jeff Greene from the UNC School of Education provides important tips to help students stay engaged while learning at home.

With schools closed and students having to learn from home, Dr. Greene says it’s more important than ever for students and families to understand how the science of learning can help them succeed.

Greene

When children are motivated to understand why they’re learning, they’re less likely to look at the clock and just consider it something that they have to endure and get through. So we talk less about you gonna learn from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. and more about you have three really important things to do in this time. And let’s get through all three. Let’s do a great job with all three. And then it takes you 50 minutes, you have extra time. That’s great.

It takes a little longer, if that’s OK, too. But by focusing on the task and why it’s important, it’s less likely that the child will be staring at the clock just waiting for ten o’clock to come around. We actually have learned a lot about how to help people make the best use of their time when they’re learning. Just rereading material isn’t a really good strategy. Students that write things down verbatim or word for word don’t tend to remember or understand things as well as they do writing things down in their own words in their own way and connecting it to things they already know.

In addition, self-testing is really powerful. And old school flashcards work really well. Writing a question on the front and the answer on the back and then self-testing or quizzing yourself is a great way to get information into your brain so that you remember it later. Those two strategies are really powerful. The other one I’d suggest just spacing out. It’s better to study one hour every day for three days than it is to study for three hours on one day.

So we want to encourage students to kind of space out learning and revisit material over longer periods of time. That will help them remember it and be able to use it. One thing that we try to do is vary the kinds of information they encounter and the ways in which that information is encountered. So reading is great; reading is fabulous. Watching educational videos is good, too. There’s nothing wrong with that. Talking with a teacher or a friend online and talking about material, that’s a great way to do it. There’s lots of different ways you can encounter information and the more different ways you encounter it, the more engaging it is and the more likely it is that you’ll remember it.

Host

Dr. Greene has strategies for managing distractions and frustrations. During this abnormal time of learning from home.

Greene

Education is about connections, right? So it’s not just about learning material, it’s also about being with people and connecting with people. And so when my daughter is connecting with her friends and talking about schoolwork, that’s a really wonderful part of learning. But I actually really encourage families and parents to find ways for their children, not just to focus on the cognitive parts of learning, but also the emotional and relational aspects of learning. And that can happen through communications with friends or teachers or other members of the family.

But those connections are really important to helping students learn. Having a plan. Having a list to do that feels manageable that the child feels like they can do well. And that’s a great way to help stay on task. Everyone gets distracted occasionally. We don’t want children to feel bad when they get distracted, but we want them to have strategies to recognize when they are distracted and be able to get back on task. Having written down a few strategies, if I get distracted by the TV in the next room, I’m going to shut the door. If I start getting distracted by my friends on Zoom, I’m going to look back at my list and tell us to get back on track. Is having some really basic strategies to deal with. Distraction is really important. As kids get older, they become more and more able to do that on their own.

It’s very natural for students to become frustrated now when they’re having to learn at home and things feel different. And there’s so many stressors in the world that either they’re hearing about or they’re seeing their families be stressed about. I think the first thing to do is family should really normalize frustration. It’s OK to get frustrated. It’s completely understandable. Sometimes just giving children a chance to express the frustration and hear that their parents or their family members care about them, that can really help them get back on track. Sometimes the frustration is more significant and sometimes children just need to take a break and taking a break is fine. It’s not the case that we have to always push kids to do more or push through the frustration.

There are times where kids and all of us just need a break. That’s OK. So there’s nothing wrong with taking a break, but we should have a plan for getting back on track.

Blouin

Thank you for listening to Focus Carolina, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To hear more interviews, visit chapelboro.com and click on 97.9 The Hill on Demand or visit thewell.unc.edu.

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Jeff Greene 1

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

Greene has one child in middle school and another in fifth grade. And during the recess from school, his family favors a preset schedule most days of the week.

Greene

In our family, we have school days and weekends and we’re trying to maintain school days. So there’s a time when the kids wake up and then there’s time for breakfast and time for learning activities. And there’s time for fun and there’s time for connecting with their friends, connecting with their parents. We try not to schedule so restrictively that the kids feel like that every minute of their day is tied up with things that they have to do.

We try to find times during the day when they’re going to do the typical things that they would do if they were in school. And that really helps them focus. And at the same time, we absolutely want them to have time to rest and relax and have some fun. At-home learning is what they call it. My son is receiving some assignments from his teachers because he’s in middle school. My daughter, who’s 10, she’s received kind of a choice board so they want my daughter every day to choose two or three things that she wants to do that spanned the various academic areas. And so we’ve schedule out time for that. And our kids know exactly when they’re supposed to be working on those things. I just think you need to find a consistent place in the house where the child will do learning work and it can be the same place they’ve done homework in the past.

Humans tend to respond really well to locations that are consistent. Most people have a place they work or a place they learn and place they have fun. And you don’t want those to intermingle because if the child is trying to learn with they’re typically having fun, that can be distracting. Likewise, you want to try to find a place in the house where the child feels comfortable and it’s inviting, but maybe not overly distracting. So not near a TV. Not near music. Not near a whole lot of activity, if at all possible.

When I’m here, I’m here to learn and I will do that. And then they can leave that place when they’re done and they can go and have fun and relax.

Host

Dr. Greene says this new normal increases the need for consistent communication between parents and children.

Greene

Parents should be talking with their children about the environment they’re creating when they learn. And that includes the music they want to play. If they want to play that, where they want to sit in the house, who they want to connect with. For example, my daughter does her homework with a friend and they do it over Zoom. That’s fine as long as they stay on task. But as a parent, it’s my job to check in, see how they’re doing and help my children create an environment that’s going to help them learn.

The research would suggest that kids are most motivated when they feel a sense of control, so when they have some legitimate choice. So one thing we did with our kids is we said here are two or three good options for where you can learn and we let them choose one. And that’s a legitimate choice that helps them feel motivated. Competence is really important. So kids when they feel like they have the ability to do the work, they’re more likely to be motivated to do so.

If you care is really important for motivation, so parents communicating care to their children is really important. And then following value is really important. How important education is as a value for us as a family. And when kids hear that, they begin to better understand the importance of education and what they’re doing. And that’s motivating. As kids get older, they can take on more of that responsibility. And learning to stay on task is like any other skill. And what the research would suggest is the more you make a plan, how to deal with distraction, the more likely it is that you’ll be successful.

Very simple things like talking to your child about what distractions do you think might occur, what challenges might you encounter as you’re trying to learn throughout the day, naming those challenges and then coming up with a strategy to deal with them and then having the child, maybe write them down or have them close by. That actually really helps because then when the challenge occurs, the child can go, ‘I know how to handle this. I’m going to do these things,’ as opposed to encountering a challenge and not having a plan and having to think up one and struggling with that. By planning ahead, parents and children can help the children better deal with distractions and staying on task. Many families struggle to find time to spend with their children and get involved in their learning. And this situation is going to kind of force parents and families to find opportunities to do that. And that can be a very good thing. When parents are more involved in their children’s learning, their children tend to be more motivated and tend to do better.

Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Kara Hume 1

Provost Blouin

Welcome to Focus Carolina, an exclusive program sponsored by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I’m Provost Bob Blouin and I’m excited to share this series of interviews with our Carolina faculty here on WCHL.

Host

With everyone staying at home to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, parents are coping with the unknown and navigating school closures, abrupt changes in routine and the loss of connections with teachers and friends. In this special edition of Focus Carolina, Kara Hume from the UNC School of Education and Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute offers advice for parents and caregivers of children and young adults with autism.

Dr. Hume got interested in autism as a teenager and dedicated her life to the condition that affects millions of people.

Hume

So when I was 16, I had to do some community service for my high school and I saw a flyer, a mom who had a young boy with autism. And I thought, all right, I’m interested, I’ll check it out. I’ve now had a relationship with that family for almost 30 years. I started working with him in his home, decided to get an undergraduate degree in special education. I was a special education teacher teaching primarily students with autism for seven years.

And during that time, I got my master’s degree in educational psychology. And when I was teaching, I just found that there were some kiddos that I was having a hard time reaching. And I wanted to know more about how to support them and how to support other teachers who were working in the field. So I went back to school to get my Ph.D. in special education. And all my work here at UNC has been around supporting individuals with autism and their teachers and family members.

I do a lot of work in schools, in homes and community centers to support individuals with autism and the folks who love them and work with them.

Host

Coronavirus presents an even greater challenge for Dr. Hume and her colleagues at UNC.

Hume

All children and young adults need support around a time of crisis, a time of uncertainty. But individuals with autism say some additional challenges that are unique to their autism, and some of those are around comprehension and understanding. So really having a clear sense about what’s happening, what is COVID, why am I not going to school? Why am I not engaging in my familiar routines? Individuals with autism really prefer things to go as predicted and prefer routines and rituals. And when those are disrupted, it can be extra hard for this population.

Another challenge is that a lot of folks with autism struggle with communication. So being able to express themselves verbally or nonverbally about what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, how they can cope and being able to ask questions is sometimes difficult for this population. When is this going to end and why is this happening and when can I go back to school? So issues around comprehension and insistence on sameness and communication can really make this whole experience more difficult for individual autism and for the families who are now supporting them at home.

Whether you have autism or not, this is a topic that will have to be revisited multiple times. Our understanding continues to shift about what social distancing and what is appropriate when you’re exercising outside. And so as new decisions are being made by policymakers and communities, all of those issues will need to be revisited very explicitly with individuals with autism. So as the rules change in the community, we’ll need to revisit those with folks with autism and with the larger community.

Anytime we’re using really abstract language or metaphors in our language to describe any situation, that can be more difficult for individuals with autism to understand, we really recommend using clear, very explicit language, even if it feels uncomfortable with important to provide information in a clear and explicit way, but also recognize that information can be anxiety provoking for all of us. So at the same time that we’re providing information, also providing supports around managing anxiety. So helping to either reinforce or build calming and coping strategies from a number of us are all of a sudden doing yoga where maybe we did it before or doing guided meditation or doing some sort of exercise that’s calming. So any support that we’re using, understanding that we want to offer that provide that support for individuals with autism.

Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Kara Hume 2

Provost Blouin

Host

Working with her colleagues at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, Dr. Hume tailored their online autism toolkit to the current crisis. The updated toolkit already has more than 100,000 downloads and is being translated into 10 languages. It contains seven new strategies for those on the autism spectrum.

Kara Hume

So our first is to support understanding and that’s really about supporting individuals with autism to comprehend this global pandemic. What is COVID? What does it mean? How do I stay safe? And provides a number of resources like stories that can help explain COVID hand-washing routine, visuals that explain social distancing and different ways that we will greet people when we are going for our nightly walk. We’re not shaking hands now; we’re waving from a distance. Some support to help our individuals understand how long is this going on? How can I count down days until there are some brighter skies coming? So sometimes individuals on the spectrum have a difficult time expressing themselves. They might be minimally verbal or even verbal, but in times of anxiety or stress, they’re not able to get out the words they need to. We’ve offered some suggestions on how they can verbally express themselves with support, how they can express themselves in other ways, or whether it’s through music or art or writing or recording their feelings through an argumentative communication device. So just lots of ways for individuals to say what they’re feeling, thinking, experiencing, even if they’re not able to verbally express themselves.

Host

Dr. Hume says the strategy of coping and calming has been the most well received in the toolkit.

Hume

This is to ensure that individuals with autism have ways to calm themselves and they might need support to explicitly be taught some calming routines. So we have some visuals on how you might teach that, how you might explain taking deep breaths and inhaling, exhaling, tensing your body, relaxing your body so you might be needing to teach some routines and also just making sure that individuals have lots of opportunity to practice those routines during the day. When they’re feeling calmer to practice their routine and then they can access when they’re feeling really stressed and anxious.

The other part of this strategy is focus on exercise and physical activity. There is a lot of research that shows that exercise and physical activity can help manage anxiety for all of us, and that is particularly applicable to individuals with autism. And so just trying to provide some visuals, around exercise, routines, some apps that people might access to support exercise during this tricky time. It is important to stick with things that are good for your body, good for your mental health.

So making sure that sleep routines stay intact, routines around maintaining your household, so involving your son, daughter or family member with household chores. And we have some tools and resources to help with that. And sometimes you may have had some routines like the use of a visual schedule or they used to have a visual choice board and we might think about using that and then expanding the use of that to provide some additional support during this difficult time.

Individuals with autism are more susceptible to being socially isolated or being lonely, and I think that’s exacerbated for all of us during this time. So making sure that we are explicit in our attempts to build social connections, continue social connections during this time. So our toolkit includes some strategies about how do you use face time. So we had explicit step by step instructions on how do you make a face time, call to someone or use the Marco Polo app, which is really a nice way to facilitate conversations with video across friends or teachers.

Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Nigel Shaun Matthews 1

Provost Blouin

Host

Dr. Nigel Shawn Matthews is director of telehealth at the UNC Adams School of Dentistry. In this special edition of Focus Carolina, he explains the role tele-dentistry plays in helping North Carolinians during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Matthews has worked diligently to develop the tele-dentistry program and the pandemic was the perfect opportunity to fast track a special service across the state.

Matthews

The Tele-Dentistry Virtual Oral Healthcare Help Line, to give its full name, was launched on Monday, March the 23rd and was a direct response of our school to really try and put in place a system whereby patients who have urgent or emergent dental needs would have a resource whereby they could seek advice, seek help, seek an opinion from someone at the school. Just because we the middle of a pandemic, of course, doesn’t mean that people won’t stop having dental emergencies. That obviously continues.

When we hear the president and the vice president giving their daily briefings, one of the things they were talking about repeatedly was encouraging patients to utilize telehealth and telemedicine to source help from doctors when they needed to. So for me, it was a No-Brainer. I can understand why tele-dentistry wasn’t even being proposed at the time. So I went to my dean and suggested we’ve been working very hard on this for the last few years.

It makes complete sense to offer it now, particularly while we’re doing social distancing and stay at home measures that patients, if they have a problem with tooth-related issue, they could pick up the phone and have either a full advisory call or a virtual real time face-to-face visit, albeit remotely, with an attending doctor who can offer them advice as to what to do next. It was not in the planning before this all kicked off. I’ve been working on tele density initiatives throughout the state for the last couple of years, so I’ve been heavily involved in trying to move the needle for the tele dentistry in the state of North Carolina because at the moment it doesn’t really exist in any shape or form. With the North Carolina Dental Society and the North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners that have been invited to be at the table and it comes to discussing how we could implement or bring tele dentistry to the entire state. I think it’s probably true to say that when you compare where we are with other states, we are a fairly long way behind when it comes to utilizing tele dentistry has another way of delivering patient care. So we have a lot of catching up to do, but we have a really good invested group of stakeholders who will be part of the discussion over the last couple of years and I’ve been part of that. I’ve been one of the co-chairman of a task force workgroup that’s been implemented by the North Carolina Dental Society, specifically to look at tele dentistry when this COVID pandemic kicked off. It actually made sense for us to step up to the plate and try and bring something to the table quickly because it was clearly needed. And that’s really what we did.

Host

Dr. Matthews and his team worked around the clock to put the oral health care help line together in record time for the phone number to be activated on March 23rd,

Matthews

Literally three, four days of intense work over the weekend prior to that, we got it all together, putting together a team at our school of people who could all make it happen, both from the development to the implementation phase. And it was a long weekend, that’s for sure, of incessant conference calls, which is what our dean asked us to do in a very short timeframe. And this is something that would normally take a good year to get off the ground, trying to get all the logistics in place. But that was a task we were entrusted with trying to do. And so that’s what we ultimately did. The purpose of the helpline was very much geared towards treating patients who’ve got urgent or emergent dental needs, not routine dental needs. Because the dictate of the American Dental Association is that all dental practices across the country should still be open and treating patients who’ve got urgent or emergent dental needs. What we should not be doing is treating patients who’ve got just routine problems or elective problems. The health plan is also geared up for that particular reason.

Dentistry and anything to do with the mouth is high risk when it comes to the transmission of the COVID 19 virus for obvious reasons. Because you are working close to mouth, you’ve got saliva and so on, you’re working close to the nasal cavity. So when dentists are using high speed drills that are aerosol driven, it obviously puts everyone at even greater risk. And that’s one of the reasons why doing elective dental procedures has been discouraged and only urgent or emergent dental problems are advised. That’s exactly what we are proposing to treat at our school.

Host

You can contact the oral health care help line at 9 1 9 5 3 7 3 0 8 8. You can also learn more online at the UNC Adams School of Dentistry page at unc.edu.

Blouin

Thank you for listening to Focus Carolina, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To hear more interviews, visit chapelboro.com and click on 97.9 The Hill On Demand or visit thewell.unc.edu.

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Nigel Shaun Matthews 2

Provost Blouin

Host

Dr. Nigel Shawn Matthews is director of telehealth at the UNC Adams School of Dentistry. In this special edition of Focus Carolina, he explains the role tele-dentistry plays in helping North Carolinians during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tele-dentistry Virtual Oral Health Care Helpline that Dr. Matthews and his team created is a dental treatment service that, for the time, being treats only emergency cases.

Dr. Matthews

When you call the line, the patient, first of all, will get through to someone who you call it a triager. or scheduler. And they consist of a fantastic group of patient care coordinators throughout our school, all of whom have a strong clinical background. So they know a lot about dental matters and dental emergencies as well. And those coordinators will then ask the patient various questions according to protocols we’ve set up. The first question they ask the patient is about their level of exposure to COVID 19 virus. In the same way if you went into the hospital, they’d ask you about things like foreign travel? Do you have a fever? Do you feel unwell, that kind of thing. So the patients are asked those questions up front. The patient is then asked specific questions that relate to whether or not their complaint constitutes a true dental emergency. And a true dental emergency is defined by guidelines that have been created by the American Dental Association, the ADA. So they then read down the script.

And if the patient does seem to fit the bill of having a true dental emergency and the triager deems it is best that that patient is then passed on to one of our on-call dental providers at our school. They will then pass the call on to the on-call dental provider who can then engage in a telephone conversation with that patient and offer the patient advice as to what they should be doing next. If the dental provider on discussion with the patient feels that they would benefit from actually physically seeing the patient that is across an audio-visual link like Zoom or Face Time, then the dental provider can ask the triager who passed the patient on to them to set up a Zoom conference call, linking the patient and the on-call dental provider and they can then see each other and have both an audio and a visual conference call. And that’s how that is managed. If the dental provider then determines that that patient does have an emergency, they should be physically seen. Then they are scheduled to come in to the Urgent Care Clinic at the School of Dentistry.

Host

Dr. Matthews says the oral health care help line accommodates patients who do not speak fluent English and for all patients to find an urgent need wherever they are calling from.

Matthews

Spanish is obviously the most common second language spoken in our school and in the state. And we have an excellent Spanish interpreter who’s on the staff at the Adams School of Dentistry. If the patient does speak Spanish, the triager links the patient to the on-call provider for a discussion as to the patient’s problem and to the patient’s needs. Then they can also send that same Zoom conference call link to our Spanish interpreter, and she can then also be a part of discussion and translate on behalf of the patient when the provider asks a patient’s questions.

She is there to translate in an official manner and to make sure that the whole flow of the conversation consultation goes well. If Spanish is not the second language and some other less commonly spoken language like, for example, Arabic. Then there’s also an over-the-phone interpretation service, or OPI, which we can also get involved in the same discussion. If the problem is so severe that it looks at the patient’s needs are best met by going to the nearest emergency department, there again, we also have a fantastic resource, a large database of practices all over North Carolina, though we have details of that we can provide patients with. If they happen to be calling from the other side of state, they can go and see a provider or go to a local dental community clinic or a federally qualified health center near to where they live, which is open and treating emergency cases.

Host

You can contact the oral health care help line at 9 1 9 5 3 7 3 0 8 8. You can also learn more online at the UNC Adams School of Dentistry page at unc.edu.

Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Jon Abramowitz 1

Provost Blouin

Host

Dr. John Abramowitz is a professor of clinical psychology and director of the UNC Anxiety Clinic. In this special edition of Focus Carolina, he talks about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our daily lives, including how isolation and social distancing affect our routines. Dr. Abramowitz says it’s completely normal for people to feel stressed and anxious right now.

Abramowitz

Well, I would imagine that the vast majority of people are feeling that way for one reason or another, most likely that has to do with the virus or maybe their health. They’re concerned about maybe their job or their finances or the health of people that they love. Anxiety is an uncomfortable experience, but most people are managing with it just fine, even through the discomfort. I would say that for people that are more introverted, maybe folks that have a little social anxiety or maybe even agoraphobia, they’re probably feeling happy to not have the pressure on to socialize or get out of their house so much these days.

We want to make sure that we don’t let the anxiety and loneliness get too far out of hand. It’s normal to have those feelings some of the time. But if they’re starting to interfere with functioning, if they’re getting in the way of sleeping, for example, if you’re losing your appetite, sometimes even worrying to an extreme amount can cause pain that can cause muscle pain because you’re chronically tensed. These are all signs, I guess, to be concerned about.

So if you’re a part of a family and you’re so anxious that you’re not able to function and complete your roles the way you want to and family or at work, then that’s something also to be concerned about. We know that people who have chronic problems with clinical anxiety, they have habits of this kind of catastrophic thinking. I can’t stand this. This is going to be the end of the world. And those are things to look out for and maybe even get some help for.

If you’re noticing that stress and anxiety like we’ve been talking about has been starting to interfere with your physical well-being, with your emotional well-being, then it is important to look into help from a mental health professional. Most mental health professionals now have moved to doing teletherapy using a platform like Zoom or Skype that ensures confidentiality and those kinds of regulations. But most therapists are able to do that. You go online and you contact someone who does typical psychological treatments, They’re more than likely able to offer you teletherapy.

Host

Combining regular routines with healthy habits while nurturing new interests are what Dr. Abramowitz recommends.

Abramowitz

The best thing that people can do is to try as much as they can to continue with their normal routine. Obviously, we want to use safe social distancing. We want to use cleaning practices, things that the government or whoever is kind of recommending to us. We want to try to eat healthy. It’s important to get a good night’s sleep. It’s really important to exercise. And I’ve seen lots of people out walking when I go out and exercise. So I’m happy to see that. This is exactly the time to catch up on books and show series that you’ve always wanted to watch. I know we’re doing that in our family. If you’re in a family, I think it’s important to go easy on ourselves. Give ourselves a break. This is not the time to expect that you’re going to be the most productive person working from home with that added stress. People are dealing with lots of different situations around elder care, childcare. So we need to kind of lean into this and give ourselves permission to experience anxiety and just understand that’s a normal, and in many ways healthy, response to this stress, the threat that’s kind of over our heads right now for a little while.

There are a lot of factors that go into developing personal routines and preference certainly is an important one. We build routines around the things that we like to do. Humans are creatures of habit. For example, I play guitar. So I’ve used this as an opportunity to really up my game. I’ve been taking some online lessons and practicing it as much as I can. When we develop routines and it helps us feel like we know what’s going to happen next, that helps us to kind of minimize our stress and make things easier during this time.

I have a motto. I’m sure lots of folks have heard this. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. This virus, we’re all affected by it. We’re all in this together. And I think we can all learn how to get through something like this together. Being able to be flexible and adapt to changes is something that’s normal and healthy. It doesn’t have to be harmful.

Blouin

Thank you for listening to Focus Carolina, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To hear more interviews, visit chapelboro.com and click on 97.7 The Hill On Demand or visit thewell.unc.edu.

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Jon Abramowitz 2

Provost Blouin

Host

Dr. John Abramowitz is a professor of clinical psychology and director of the UNC Anxiety Clinic. In this special edition of Focus Carolina, he talks about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our daily lives, including how isolation and social distancing affect our routines. Dr. Abramowitz believes that the ability to stay connected is far more important than one’s chronological age during isolation.

Abramowitz

So we hear about this a lot on the news that elderly folks aren’t doing as well and from a health perspective, from a medical health perspective, that might be true. From a psychological or an anxiety perspective, I think it depends less on the chronological age and more on your environment and your social support system. Some people might be physically alone, but even if they’re elderly and they’re tech savvy and they know how to work zoom on their computers and they’re able to engage with other people and they’re probably doing just fine. Just the way that they might be doing if it wasn’t a pandemic going on right now. On the other hand, no matter what age you are, if you don’t have access to the Internet, then you could feel really lonely. Kids have generally done fine. They tend to play video games and have things to occupy themselves and they can hang out with their friends online. I think it has more to do with your environment than it does necessarily your chronological age. Even if it’s by the old-fashioned telephone. Some way to kind of have that’s really important. Finding ways to watch series on TV, get into a good book, trying to have some sort of active social life in one way or another I think will help folks to do OK. It depends on how people were functioning, how lonely they were before this pandemic. Folks that were functioning well beforehand, I think that’s a good predictor of how folks will do during this situation. It’s a good idea, pick up the phone, especially if they’re not tech savvy. Pick up the phone, give them a call, check in with them, maybe even plan a specific time when you’re going to check in with them every day so that they have something to look forward to if they’re very lonely.

Host

According to Dr. Abramowitz, conflicting information can be another source of stress and anxiety during a crisis. His suggestions?

Abramowitz

I go to the scientific literature. I think that there’s nothing that beats what we can learn through science. Science is not perfect, but I think that that gives us the best answer that we can apply to the largest number of people. We can always find anecdotes and we have our traditions and we have our personal experiences that we can use. But nothing beats science when it comes to psychological counseling and therapy. I do like to hear how is this network spinning this and all that and absolutely nothing makes my blood boil more than watching some of that.

What I have started to do is, I have an app where I will read the news. It’s AP app. I’ll check it like once or twice a day. I try not to turn on the television. If I do it, it’s one of the local channels, usually that’s not one of these 24 hour news channels just to get some facts, hopefully. And then I turn it off. I know there’s a virus going on out there and when there’s real big news, I’ll hear about it.

But I don’t need to know every little tweet and all that kind of stuff. So I try to stay away from it, but not completely, because you do want to feel plugged in. There is a group of us, multinational group that has started to form. We call ourselves the Corona Phobia Group and we’re studying illness, anxiety, anxiety that happens in the wake of pandemics like this. And we’ve had these before. We’ve had outbreaks of like the Zika virus and the Ebola virus and these other sorts of viruses over the years.

And we studied the way that people respond, their level of anxiety, trying to predict who’s going to have more difficulty than others. And so we are in the initial stages of developing a line of research to look at how folks are responding to the coronavirus.

Host

Dr. Abramowitz joined UNC’s highly ranked psychology department from Minnesota and remembers one of his future colleagues telling him there is always at least one 70-degree day in every winter month.

Abramowitz

I had an interview. I think it was right around Valentine’s Day, so middle of February. And while Minnesota, where I was living, was 30 degrees below zero, it was 70 here. And actually during that interview, someone I was interviewing with said, yeah, we’ll get a 70-degree day in every month of the year. They’ll be at least one 70-degree day, which, by the way, sold me on the job. But also, I have kept track of that. And I think there’s maybe been like two or three months in the 14 or 15 years that I’ve been here when there was not a 70-degree day. It’s a great thing to use to brag to my friends who are still up north.

Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

Welcome to a special edition of Focus Carolina, an exclusive program sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Today, we are talking with Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz about the coronavirus, its effect on the university and how researchers in the community have come together to respond. Here is Brighton McConnell with Chancellor Guskiewicz.

McConnell

When we spoke with you in March, you had just launched your new strategic plan, Carolina Next: Innovations for Public Good. But then COVID-19 came along and interrupted everything. Could you bring us up to speed on how that strategic plan is going?

Chancellor Guskiewicz

We are still leaning on Carolina. Next, innovations for public good as our roadmap and we’re thankful that we have that road map right now because it’ll become ever more important over the next several months as we’re insuring everyone that our priorities remain the same. The impact certainly cannot be overstated. Every member of our community has felt the effects of it, and many of the changes to daily life have come quickly. We’ve had to make decisions fairly rapidly, oftentimes with limited information but our students and faculty completed the spring semester with remote instruction and did an incredible job of pivoting quickly to that. The majority of our staff are working from home and we’ve had to make decisions about summer school being taught online. That was a decision we made about three weeks ago and we had to suspend all campus group activities until June 30th. So right now, in the midst of planning for the fall, looking at a number of different scenarios and happy to talk more about that. Carolina next is still a roadmap that’s going to be important to us.

McConnell

You mentioned a few ways that students, faculty and staff have been adapting to this kind of new normal that we’re living in but what are some other ways?

Guskiewicz

We have to take guidance from our state and local health officials. We’re fortunate at Carolina to have some of the world’s most accomplished infectious disease experts at our School of Public Health and School of Medicine, even our faculty in the School of Government and some of our departments in the College of Art and Sciences and Economics and Political Science that are helping local government think about the ways in which we can restart the economy here in North Carolina and overcome some of the budgetary constraints and budget shortfalls that we’ve may experience.

Our infectious disease experts are helping us think about the possibility of starting that fall semester on time, which is August the 16^th. We’re scheduled to have new student convocation at Carmichael Arena and then classes beginning on August the 18th. We’re working closely with the UNC system office on a number of decisions, but each of the 17 system schools has its own academic calendar. While we’re working with the system office, we do have the autonomy to make decisions about when we would start the semester and the way in which we would deliver that instruction.

McConnell

I imagine that this must be especially hard on the outgoing class, the class of 2020. Are there any plans yet for their commencement ceremony which had to be postponed?

Guskiewicz

This is certainly not what we expected for our spring semester and for those graduating seniors. We’ve received almost 4,000 responses from the class of 2020 asking how they want to mark this moment in their lives. And we’re going to hold a commencement ceremony for them on campus here at the appropriate time. We’re looking at dates in September, October, a few dates in November. I remain optimistic we’ll be able to celebrate this amazing class of 2020.

McConnell

Carolina researchers and health care workers are some of the people who are on the very front lines fighting this disease. Could you tell us a little bit about some of their work?

Guskiewicz

Carolina was ranked the number one university in the U.S. for researchers fighting the virus. We’re very proud of that. Dr. Ralph Baric’s team in our Gillings School of Global Public Health is working to develop an antiviral drug that will prevent the viral replication of COVID-19. And the drug has shown promising results, and that’s progressing to human clinical trials. The World Health Organization thinks it’s probably the most promising treatment for COVID-19. And you may have seen Dr. Baric on CNN have some great news with the early results of these clinical trials. Dr. Jessica Lin in the Department of Medicine is working with colleagues to launch a trial that focuses on limiting both the acceleration of COVID-19 in individuals and the spread of it to household members. It’s about two months ago, Dr. Melissa Miller and her team of researchers led the development of a COVID-19 test for the UNC Medical Center to ease demand on State Health Department, State Health Department and Lab Corp. in terms of just quick early detection of COVID-19. And so it’s been incredible to see how our researchers here have responded.

The CDC and the NIH were the only two institutions in the U.S. that were doing any more in terms of having an impact than our researchers here at Carolina. So we’re really proud of their work. It’s having a great impact.

Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz, part 2

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

Welcome to a special edition of Focus Carolina, an exclusive program sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We are continuing our interview with Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz about the coronavirus, its effect on the University and how researchers and the community have come together to respond. Here is Brighton McConnell with Chancellor Guskiewicz.

McConnell

What other examples may be outside of the medical field have you seen or heard about the Carolina community coming together during this time?

Chancellor Guskiewicz

As I’ve said repeatedly during all of this, Carolina is, at its heart, its people. And I think we’re seeing that right now and we’ve seen that over the past few months. We’ve had our School of Education working closely with Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center, providing resources for at-home learning to our state teachers, students and parents. We had Rich Superfine, who heads up our Applied Physical Sciences Department and BeAM makerspace working with other universities in the region to provide Triangle-area hospitals with personal protective equipment, building face shields. They’ve put in hundreds of hours making thousands of protective shields for our health care workers.

School of Government hosted a webinar for local government leaders across North Carolina to learn more about COVID-19 and the roles of local and state emergency management officials across the state. And Carolina Dentistry is offering teledentistry services through a virtual helpline for patients with issues regarding oral health. And so it goes on and on and on. And I’m just so proud of the many ways in which our community has risen to the occasion and just our incredible world-class class faculty pivoting in about a week to be able to deliver 98 percent of our courses remotely to our students. I think was just a way in which the community came together.

McConnell

How do alumni and donors fit into that? How are they making a difference?

Guskiewicz

They certainly have stepped up as well. We very quickly created a student impact fund to help students in need, families in need with emergency support for expenses such as housing, food, travel, technology. Right now, we’re sitting at somewhere in the neighborhood about 850 students we’ve provided funding for. Donors stepped up alumni base and raising more than a million dollars to the COVID-19 response fund, as we’re calling it, for UNC Health to buy critical PPE and lab equipment and provide financial support for medical students. In addition to that, that student impact fund raised over eight hundred thousand dollars. Alumni started an organization called Feed the Fight to raise money to purchase meals from local restaurants for UNC Health workers. Just been incredible to see the many ways in which our alumni base and donors have stepped up.

We held our first ever Faculty Council meeting by Zoom. I emphasized that every revenue source at our University is jeopardized right now and we need to be sure that we’re thinking about that, too. It’s not just about tuition and student fees around auxiliaries, such as housing and dining, parking receipts. It’s about tuition and state appropriation for enrollment. It’s around ticket receipts for sporting events and performing arts events. And we have to keep this in mind as we’re thinking about ways to overcome a very likely budget shortfall.

Host

Now, with those challenges in mind, Chancellor Guskiewicz, what is giving you hope during these uncertain times? What gives you a little bit of optimism that you can get out of this deficit?

Guskiewicz

It’s about people and they inspire us every day. Shortly after this pandemic started, we sent out a notice that students shouldn’t return to campus. And the first email that I received was from a student who runs the campus food shelter. He was worried about the students and staff who rely on that food shelter. We were gonna make sure that they had access to and could be fed. And so we worked with a local group to make sure that that could still happen, even though the students weren’t going to be on campus here to help run that food shelter. I’ve had emails from students asking about volunteering at the hospital during a highly vulnerable time and environment over there. As I’ve talked about it on a number of occasions over the past year and I brought this into my commencement speech last May, Charles Kuralt‘s 1985 commencement speech, where he talked about Carolina being a conspiracy of good people. And he described that conspiracy as people who return us to reason, compassion and decency. And I think we’ve seen that every day here at Carolina.

Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Steven King 1

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

At the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Steven King is an expert in using emerging technologies. In this special edition of Focus Carolina, he explains how COVID-19 is jumpstarting the future of remote work. As UNC switched over to remote learning, Professor King continued teaching in virtual reality, more commonly known as three dimensional, at UNC’s Reese Innovation Lab on Franklin Street.

Steven King

I think that COVID-19 has really been a steroid shot to the change of remote work. The idea of virtual spaces and virtual reality as a place for gathering and collaboration has become a necessary tool that we need to get work done. The current situation has really thrown us into that faster than I would have expected. Virtual reality has been around for several years and it’s been somewhat of a slow adoption. And so you would have thought that collaborative spaces in VR would have taken off a lot faster. But now that we’ve seen the COVID response, a lot more companies and a lot more universities are trying to look at this as a possible place for collaboration and education and for meetings that’s an alternative to the in-class or in-person meetings. And it’s an alternative to the Zoom or the video conferencing systems. As a professor, I was trying to figure out what’s going to be the best way for me to teach my classes online, as well as help other professors in that same situation.

I have some experience teaching online. I’ve taught in our online master’s program before, and so I felt very comfortable moving into that position. But I wanted to make sure that we were doing it in the best way possible. I teach emerging technologies, which uses virtual reality and augmented reality. In my VR class, it made sense that we would jump into a fully virtual class. Students are now spending their entire class time with me in a VR headset and we gather in a 3D space. So we were able to put this together really quickly based on the information coming to us. We knew it was coming. We had a few days to prepare and then we were able to send headsets out to all those students.

I think most of the faculty members have been using Zoom or something similar for the in-class meetings. And this was an alternative that was truly an experiment. I don’t know of another example of a college class being fully in VR where every student is in a VR headset. And it was something that we weren’t trying to force or push on to any of the other professors. So I was one willing to try it and do it in my class. And I think people are excited to hear what the results are gonna be.

Host

Virtual reality is exactly that. In his emerging technology class, Professor King builds a virtual furnished classroom where everyone gathers, speaks and gestures in the images of avatars they select.

King

When you enter the virtual classroom, you see a big open space that has high-top tables on one side, and it has couches and other types of seating gathered around a really large screen. So you can approach me and I’m standing up by the screen at the front of the class and that’s where I teach from. And then I can break them up into groups and send them out to those standing tables. As I approach a group, each student is represented by their own avatars, avatars that they have created and show a little bit of their personality.

They could choose to make their avatar more of a cartoon character. They could put a hoodie on it. One student even makes sure to change her clothes before every class to change her outfit. And so I see the students as avatars, as the way all the other students do. When I’m standing in front of a class and teaching, I see 28 avatars. I see cartoon representations of those students. The virtual reality classroom or collaborative spaces are very different than a Zoom environment. When someone starts to speak, I see their mouth start to move of the avatar. I see their hands move as they’re making hand gestures. And so it’s similar to the more like the real world than it is to a video conference. In VR I have body language, I have expressions, and I have the ability to kind of move my hands and move my body. So when I’m teaching, I’m literally pacing back and forth in front of the screen and students have more of that realistic in-person feeling to it.

We have tested several different technologies for being able to do this. The one we spend most of our time for my class is in Altspace VR and Altspace is a company that was bought by Microsoft that provides an infrastructure for managing and dealing in 3D space and people being able to connect together through virtual reality. So this is the technology that I’m experimenting with for my Emerging Technologies class. It is not widespread yet, but this is something that we’ve been testing and trying out during the COVID crisis.

Blouin

Thank you for listening to Focus Carolina, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To hear more interviews, visit Chapelboro.com and click on 97.9 The Hill On Demand or visit thewell.unc.edu.

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Steven King 2

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

At the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Steven King is an expert in using emerging technologies. In this special edition of Focus Carolina, he explains how COVID 19 is jumpstarting the future of remote work. As UNC switched over to remote learning, Professor King continued teaching in virtual reality, more commonly known as three dimensional, at UNC’s Reese Innovation Lab on Franklin Street. Professor King has learned that remote education profoundly changes the relationship between teacher and student.

Steven King

It’s hard to have that same one on one, or one on three, or one on 20 where you’re having this dialogue and this interaction. I think you have to work harder in a different way to have or supplement those types of conversations. And so when I think of my job as a professor in a coaching role and a mentoring role, that’s a lot harder to do remotely. And I’m going to have to use other tools to be able to do that.

We’re already working with companies who are trying to define what it means to be a company that uses these technologies and our students who already have this experience are already a step ahead and ready to fulfill those jobs. Now, I don’t think that every job is going to require virtual reality experience in the near future, but in the next two to three to five years, as the cost of headsets come down and some of the technologies advance, especially the collaborative places advance, I could see an expectation that the same way you might have to have a tablet for work, you would also have to have a VR headset or a way of collaborating in a virtual space like that.

I can see in the very near future that students would have their laptops and show up for class. And then the professor could say, now put on your VR headset or we’re gonna go into a collaborative experience or we’re gonna go into a simulation in VR. Either working in a remote situation or you’re teaching in a remote situation you have to communicate very well. Tone and intent is really important and hard to convey in what we would say is asynchronous communication. So email, text messages and those kind of things, you have to over communicate and you have to be very clear on your communication. We often try to be funny in text and things, and that can be really hard and doesn’t come across the same way. And sometimes on a video conference, it doesn’t come across the same way.

Let me give you an example: In the Zoom class that I teach, I ask students questions and try to get them to facilitate discussion. And in a regular classroom, I might have to wait three or four seconds before the first student raises their hand or pipes in. On a video conference, I often count to twelve before someone answers. And so that’s kind of been my rule is count to 12 before I prompt them with another form of the question or rephrase or call someone out, because I think you feel this need to kind of stay back. You gotta unmute your microphone. And so it’s a little bit of a different dialogue and different discussion. That’s why I like the virtual reality or the 3D space, because it’s more similar to what we do in a traditional in-person classroom. Students can see body language, students can see how people are interacting, and they can choose to pipe in when they want to. They know when there’s breaks in the conversation. And it’s very easy to have that dialogue.

Host

No matter the interactive platform, Professor King says that consistent communication is the key to success between parties learning to communicate in a different way.

King

Working with remote team, I think you have to be conscious about communicating well. I think you also have to be concerned about the social well-being of each of your employees because this is a different environment. And I think as a leader, I want to make sure that I am meeting the needs of my team, even though those are maybe socially or emotionally. So one of the things that I think is important is you find ways to have a little bit of fun the same way we do about going to lunch or something if we were in person. We’ve got to find those ways to do that digitally, and it’ll be different for every team.

When this crisis subsides, I expect to see a lot more remote working opportunities. I think there’ll be new jobs created that will enable work to be done remotely. I think you’ll see more flexible policies from different organizations that are now better equipped to allow for remote work. They have experience with it and so they feel more comfortable with it. And so I think you’re going to continue to see that. I don’t think it’ll be at the scale that we’re seeing it right now. But I do think that remote work will not only continue after the crisis is over, but I think it will be far greater and in much more abundance than what we saw prior to the crisis.

Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Cheryl Giscombe 1

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

Trained in both nursing and psychology, Cheryl Giscombe leads self-care initiatives in the UNC School of Nursing. In this special edition of Focus Carolina, she talks about how mindfulness can play a role in reducing anxiety. Nurses need to take care of themselves so they can attend to others with calm and resilience.

Giscombe

Self-care is important for everyone right now. Be it health care professionals on the front lines, other staff in hospitals and clinics, people who work in grocery stores, delivery people. But also just regular human beings who are trying one way or another to cope with COVID-19. Nurses are consistently rated as the world’s most trusted health care professional. We make up the largest body of health care professionals across the world and we work directly with patients and their families along with other health care providers and health care workers. So their job, they’re really important. And the health of nurses is critical for the health of everyone else.

It’s important. Number one because caregivers tend to put themselves last. They’ve often been called to help others and they wake up every day with a mindset of how can I help other people? And so when they put themselves on the back burner, they can be at risk for burnout, fatigue, exhaustion. And when that’s the case, they can’t do their best in caring for other people, their immune systems don’t rebound they way they should. So consistent self-care, consistent strategies for wellness is a particular tool. It’s important because when nurses are well, they have the capacity to promote wellness for everyone. And there are many ways that nurses can make even a little bit of space in their day to care for themselves and to nurture themselves. One is by staying in touch with other nurses because then they can relate to other people who understand what they’re going through. So supporting one another through this.

Another is just being mindful of self-care practices that are key for everyone, such as exercise, going outside if possible, or walking even just 15 to 20 minutes. If you can do 30 minutes or more, that would be great. Meditation is something that everyone can do no matter where they are. And that is a particularly useful strategy for nurses who are dealing with, for lack of a better term, payoff in a number of ways. Mindfulness, meditation, relaxation training can be very helpful for nurses in this time.

Host

Professor Giscombe has practiced various forms of meditation through most of her adult life and has become a specialist in one particular area.

Giscombe

Mindfulness is a form of meditation. It’s an ancient practice that has been used over the years among various cultures around the world to promote stress reduction, management of reactivity to life stressors and challenges. And it can promote overall well-being. It’s been researched heavily. Mindfulness has been studied to help people with their immune system, with cardiovascular conditions, cancer. It can help people to increase compassion for themselves, with compassion for others, and to help people be more aware of the impact that stress is having on their body so they can do more to prevent stress related health outcomes versus treating them on the other end of the spectrum.

It can require self-discipline to practice mindfulness daily. However, it’s quite simple in that oftentimes when we’re feeling worry or we’re feeling doubtful or fear, we’re often either worried about something that has happened in the past. It’s happened already, it’s over. Or we’re anxious or concerned about what’s going to happen in the future. And, of course, that’s natural, human beings do that. But what that ends up doing to us is we miss out on the present.

And mindfulness in each present moment can help us to have space for peacefulness, calmness and a little bit less distress. Mindfulness is this present moment awareness. So even in the midst of, say, COVID-19 or grief or a lot of challenges, if we notice what we’re doing in the very present moment right here, right now, we’re actually OK if we’re not focusing on the past or the future. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t plan. It doesn’t mean that it’s bad to think about the past but allows us to be aware of how thoughts can take over our minds and how they can really influence our emotions and then our behaviors. So when we have a distressing experience, be it an acute stressor or just living life, things that happen chronically over time that are to be expected in life, often they don’t last. Those troubled sometimes don’t last forever. And even the course of a day, there’s room for joy or for lightheartedness.

Provost Bob Blouin

Thank you for listening to Focus Carolina, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To hear more interviews, visit Chapelboro.com and click on 97.9 The Hill on demand or visit thewell.unc.edu.

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Cheryl Giscombe 2

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

Trained in both nursing and psychology, Cheryl Giscombe leads self-care initiatives in the UNC School of Nursing. In this special edition of Focus Carolina, she talks about how mindfulness can play a role in reducing anxiety. Professor Giscombe teaches her nurses to regard stress and pressure as something that will surely pass.

Giscombe

So if we are feeling overwhelmed or distressed, we may think about it like the waves of an ocean where the waves inevitably are going to come in. So stressful events are often going to come in, but just like the waves of an ocean, they’re going to go out. And so we know they don’t stay and they don’t stay at their highest peak all the time. So what do we do when they’re in? We recognize, okay, this is a wave or another way of looking at it, a roller coaster ride.

But I can still be dignified in my experience of this. I can still be thoughtful about how I’m going to respond to this challenge or this stressor. And I can use my resources to be as mindful, for lack of a better term, as possible so that I can get through this moment until the next time comes, because it will. And it’s the course of life. And it doesn’t mean we should accept challenges, but we know as long as we’re alive, they’re gonna come, they’re gonna go.

And so how do we equip ourselves with resources that will sustain us as much as possible in those moments? One of my favorite types of meditation is called Lovingkindness Meditation. It’s also called “metta”. And it’s an ancient practice, it’s not new, but it’s something that we all can use in modern times. And that practice allows us to, first of all, take a seated posture and feel grounded in our seat or a cushion if we’re sitting on the floor and notice our breath as it’s going in and out.

So just noticing and being aware of our breathing can help us to be more mindful in the present. It’s a very useful tool. And then what we can do in Lovingkindness Meditation is enhance our ability to have compassion for ourselves and others. Often in the moments of distress, we may be doing all kinds of judgmental self-talk. And so Lovingkindness Meditation is a way of deepening compassion for ourselves and also compassion for others because they go hand-in-hand. The more compassion we have for ourselves, the more we can have for others.

Host

Professor Giscombe is grateful for all the support the UNC School of Nursing receives.

Giscobme

One very wonderful thing about the School of Nursing at UNC Chapel Hill is that we have been supported very generously by Melissa and Harry LeVine. Melissa is a graduate of the School of Nursing and been very concerned about the well-being of nurses and how nurses learn from their faculty members and by other older nurses that have been practicing longer than our nursing students have been practicing. They are quite interested in supporting wellness and sustainability and the careers of nurses. So they have contributed financially over many years to our school.

They funded a wellness room that has exercise equipment. And more recently, back in 2015, 2016, they funded the Melissa and Harry LeVine distinguished professorship in nursing and I have had the fortune of being the inaugural Melissa and Harry LeVine distinguished associate professor. So in that role, I am fortunate to bring wellness activities to our faculty, staff and students and also support wellness research by our students. And one other great thing that I get to do in that role is to teach mindfulness to our nursing students and medical students, along with my colleague, Dr. Susan Gaylord, who’s in the School of Medicine. So now we have a mindfulness class that nursing and medical school students can take for credit in the School of Nursing and in the School of Medicine. That has been very gratifying because we know that’s helping health care providers provide better high-quality care. So it’s another way that we can improve the well-being of those around the world.

So it’s a multipronged approach. We teach the students how to practice mindfulness meditation. We teach them about research in mindfulness meditation. And we talk about how mindfulness can be used in their patient care. About a third of the time of class we’re actually learning new meditation practices and techniques. We’re looking at the latest research. And students actually are assigned to find research on mindfulness and report it back to their colleagues, where we critique those articles and assess the methodology and the findings. So then they are more equipped not only to understand what goes in to developing good research, but how research on mindfulness can inform health care providers practice and patient care. So they come out with a lot, once they’re done with the class.

Provost Bob Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Benjamin Mason Meier 1

Provost Bob Blouin

Welcome to Focus, Carolina, an exclusive program sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m Provost Bob Blouin and I’m excited to share this series of interviews with our Carolina faculty here on WCHL.

Host

Benjamin Mason Meier’s research across the Department of Public Policy and the Gillings School of Global Public Health is interdisciplinary. In this week’s special edition of Focus Carolina, he talks about the role public policy plays in a global health crisis. Professor Meyer and his team have been working on the coronavirus pandemic response since February, developing research that does three things.

Meier

First, we’re supporting the United Nations and helping them to understand how human rights can frame the pandemic response. Both how human rights are limited in the pandemic response, whether limiting travel, freedom of movement, privacy, but also thinking about how human rights can frame both the health care response and the basic needs of those who are practicing social distancing. Second, we’re really working with the World Health Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations, to understand what types of public policy reforms governments will need to develop in order to respond to this pandemic: to prevent infectious diseases, to detect diseases when they arise and to respond when an outbreak occurs. And finally, we’re reflecting on the limitations of the current response and we’re examining the reforms in global health governance that will be necessary, considering how the international health regulations, which are the international law that governs this response, how these international health regulations can be revised to bring nations together in meeting future threats.

Host

Professor Meier’s research into the spread of the novel coronavirus has found that there are weaknesses in various national health policies and the global health governance overall.

Meier

I hope to provide a timeline of how public policy is driven the pandemic from the start and how public policy now will be necessary in bringing an end to this cataclysmic threat. I spent the last decade trying to understand these global policy efforts and really to use my research to frame the policies that are necessary to prevent, detect and respond to disease. And yet, this novel Coronavirus has spread throughout the world because of weaknesses in national policies and global health governance.

It’s highlighted the limitations of the international health regulations around three areas. First, reporting public health risks to W.H.O. Second, declaring a public health emergency where it’s necessary to facilitate the global response. And third, coordinating national responses to meet the public health risk. And so in first thinking about reporting, we recognize that COVID-19 began in China, but that delays in reporting made this possible public health emergency unknown to the world. It limited the World Health Organization’s ability to understand the scope of the threat and coordinate the global response.

And we saw China take a number of actions to restrict information coming out of the country in order to keep W. H. O. from making what would be an economically damaging declaration of a public health emergency of international concern. China finally notified the World Health Organization on New Year’s Eve. But second, even with this notification, we see that there remained inadequate knowledge of disease transmission. The W.H.O. did not declare a public health emergency of international concern until January 30^th, by which point the Coronavirus was well on its way to becoming a pandemic.

And then following the declaration of this public health emergency, we’ve seen nations instead pursue increasingly counterproductive travel bans that have not worked. We’ve seen limitations on individual rights that have threatened public health. We’ve seen attacks on the World Health Organization in ways that have divided the world at the moment when we need to come together in facing this common threat. Undermining the World Health Organization while failing in their own isolation measures. And this is what makes the work that I do, in some way, so timely, the ability to research public policies to consider their public policy effectiveness.

Provost Bob Blouin

Thank you for listening to Focus Carolina, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To hear more interviews, visit Chapleboro.com and click on 97.9 The Hill on demand or visit thewell.unc.edu.

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Benjamin Mason Meier 2

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

Benjamin Mason Meier’s research across the Department of Public Policy and the Gillings School of Global Public Health is interdisciplinary. In this week’s special edition of Focus Carolina, he talks about the role public policy plays in a global health crisis. Professor Meier researches the different ways countries can respond to a national health crisis from democracies like the United States to autocracies like China.

Meier

The Chinese example was originally seen as the most effective. The government locked down Wuhan for 10 straight weeks. No one left their homes, at all, before opening. And it was seen initially that this was the type of aggressive response that was necessary in order to defeat this disease. But recent examples have shown that transparent government institutions, that democracies have proven far more effective in containing the disease. And so in South Korea and Taiwan, we see vast testing resources, testing people multiple times, developing a contact tracing system for anyone who has tested positive for this disease.

Now, as we face this in the United States, we see a government that never took a clear threat seriously. It failed to accept the reality of a pandemic until too late. It’s failed to prepare for increasing diagnostic testing, PPE, ventilators. It’s not been transparent about the struggle ahead. And in the absence of a federal response, we’ve seen 50 different states develop 50 different state responses to this pandemic. And we’re already beginning to see challenges as different states open up too soon.

We are very much still in the early stages of the pandemic response. This coronavirus is rapidly spreading throughout the world. There’s a great deal that governments can learn from each other in understanding the policy approaches that are most effective in preventing, detecting and responding to this novel threat.

Host

Professor Meier’s time at UNC has helped him understand how policies can fail through massive communication gaps.

Meier

Public health is political. Public health has always been political. And the political decisions that are made determine whether millions of people live or die. And so it’s important to specify where these authorities lie in advance so that they aren’t being made in the heat of a pandemic. And in the context of an Ebola outbreak, all communications with the public were made through the Centers for Disease Control by the scientific advisors responsible for addressing these issues with the public. It was done by way of agency regulation and inter-agency agreement within the U.S. government that within the entire federal government, the CDC would be the chief public communicator in that context.

That being said, all of those inter-agency agreements can be overridden by the office of the White House. And so in this context, it became very clear very quickly that the career employees working in public health would be sidelined in favor of political actors. And the concern with the political actors communicating with the public is that the political actor will put their own political fortunes ahead of the health of the public. And what we see across countries is that the public is most likely to comply with public health requirements and that the pandemic is most successfully responded to when people have trust in the people who are speaking for the government.

UNC is a remarkable place. It was the first American university to work with the World Health Organization. And when I came to UNC, joining this leading public university, studying public health, I wanted to be both part of the research environment in Chapel Hill, but also the engaged work in the Research Triangle. And so I’m teaching inspiring students. I’m taking on groundbreaking research with them and I’m engaging with policymakers to advance global health. All from our little town in North Carolina. And none of this would have been possible without our Carolina students. They’re coming together to use their knowledge to build a better world. And in these uncertain times, it’s really the passionate scholarship of our Carolina students that gives me hope for the future.

Provost Bob Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Jordynn Jack 1

Provost Bob Blouin

Welcome to Focus Carolina, an exclusive program sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m Provost Bob Blouin. And I’m excited to share this series of interviews with our Carolina faculty here on WCHL.

Host

A professor of English and comparative literature, Jordynn Jack used the transition to remote learning in the Spring semester as an opportunity for her students to apply what they were learning in her writing class. As part of their final project, some students kept journals about their experiences during the COVID-19 global health pandemic. As UNC turned to online classes due to the pandemic, Dr. Jack gave her students the option of expressing their feelings about the suspended Spring semester.

Jack

Just before Spring break our class had been looking at Civil War diaries and other materials written by women around the Civil War era. So it was fortuitous that we had already been looking at diaries and journals and thinking about them. And I came across some articles about journals and diaries as a useful historical record of what we’re going through now. And so I decided to change course and make that one of the options for the final project for the class. I thought it would be especially useful for people to write about their thoughts and feelings as they’re living through this moment.

So I gave them two choices. One was to keep a diary. I think I stipulated for at least six days noting what they experienced that day, what they noticed in the news, what their life was like that day, and then write a narrative style diary entry and then I asked them to include images with it. So it was also kind of a visual diary and they took photos or sometimes they used online photos that they came across online photos and added them to kind of contextualize what was happening. And then the other choice, since it was a history of writing class, was to create a digital exhibit where they would take some aspect of something we’d studied in class and do more research and present it similarly in a visual way. It was a switch from what we had planned, but I think it worked out really well.

It was about 50 50. Some of the students chose to do something else and we had a series of weekly activities where we talked about our plans for the project and how they were going. And some people said that they just felt it was too close, that they couldn’t get distance, or that they weren’t sure how they felt yet and they would rather have some time not to be thinking about it. So I was glad that I gave them the choice. But then about 50 percent chose to do the diary and they seemed to really enjoy it and find it useful as a way of processing their feelings and just recording what was going on during their experience.

Host

Dr. Jack was taken with the personal experiences of students whose lives had changed dramatically during the pandemic.

Jack

A lot of them kind of developed a theme over time, almost organically. And so read together, they address a bunch of different aspects of the pandemic. So there were some students who were traveling abroad in some cases who were going through airports or seeing how people were reacting in different countries. Returning to the United States, for instance, and seeing all of a sudden coming back, everyone was wearing masks and the airports were configured differently and everyone was wiping down their seats in the airplane. That kind of travel theme comes up a lot.

Relationships come up a lot. So there were a couple of students who wrote about what it was like being a college student who was used to living apart from their family, going back to their childhood home, and renegotiating what it was like. So what does it mean to be a good daughter when you’re trying to study and get all of your school work done, but also take care of a family member, for instance?

Or there’s one student who ended up writing about his younger sister a lot and how their relationship was evolving now that they were back in the same home. And then I guess the third theme was, I had a couple of seniors in the class. And for them especially, it was challenging to find out that their senior year was cut off. One student was looking for jobs and she wrote about what it was like to do interviews now. At first, they were face to face, but really awkward because you couldn’t shake hands. And then she moved into doing online interviews for jobs. And then I had a student-athlete who found out that his season with canceled. It was a track and field athlete and he was planning to have one last chance to be in a championship meet. And so he wrote a lot about what student-athletes were doing on campus and how they were coping with that loss. And there’s a really touching moment where he went to the track one day and, he’s a javelin thrower, so he just threw javelin after javelin because he knew it would be his last time to have that chance to practice at UNC. So things like that were really emotional to read.

Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Jordynn Jack 2

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

A professor of English and comparative literature, Jordynn Jack used the transition to remote learning in the Spring semester as an opportunity for her students to apply what they were learning in her writing class. As part of their final project, some students kept journals about their experiences during the COVID-19 global health pandemic. Dr. Jack believes the worldwide coverage of the pandemic will be an important resource for researchers studying this era in the future.

Jordynn Jack

There are archives somewhere and you can come across them. They often give a personal side to things that you’ve read about, kind of, in other sources in newspapers or in articles or things that have been published. So I think in the same way, these kinds of sources will be useful because we have such a glut of public information about what’s going on. But to know how people are experiencing the changes that we’re seeing right now in some kind of personal record, I think will be really valuable.

One of the things that strikes me about the situation we’re in is that things change so quickly and what we consider normal one day has changed dramatically. And so, even a few months in, we’re used to people wearing masks and we’re used to the markers in all the stores and reminders about social distancing and about washing your hands. But to see someone’s reaction the first time they see something like that, I think is going to be valuable in the future to understand how regular people interpreted it.

It definitely seems like science fiction to me in a lot of ways. The cases where people are coming home from a trip abroad or flying into the airport and seeing everything dramatically changed all of a sudden. So over time, there seems to be a pattern that kind of forms some of the students write about how their daily life has started to become a routine. In some cases, quite a few of the students, at least while they were doing coursework, were pretty isolated in their rooms because they had to go on their computers and do Zoom calls and get their homework done.

And then others seem to fall into a pattern with their family. So there was a student who was allowed by his parents to go out and get an iced coffee every day. That was his one trip to the outside. So he and a sister would go every day and get the iced coffee and then they would tan outside and that was part of their routine. And they were only allowed to see friends if they could social distance. So they had a socially distant outdoor gathering with a few friends. But that was their only permitted social activity. So seeing how people negotiate, what the rules are and what that means for them and how in a family, especially as a college student, you’re probably used to doing your own thing most of the time. Suddenly there’s a different protocol for how you interact with other people.

Host

Dr. Jack also heads up a new program for students that teaches expressive writing in a flow state. This can be especially important during these stressful times.

Jack

We have a lab that housed in Greenlaw Hall that’s part of the Department of English and Comparative Literature called HHIVE, which stands for Health and Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Venue for Exploration. And one of the great things about HHIVE is that it’s a vertical research community, I guess you could say, where we’ve always had undergraduate and grad students and Ph.D. students, both master’s and Ph.D. students and faculty involved. And it’s part of our master’s program in literature, medicine and culture. And we established HHIVE as our community building site for our students, but also as a hub, basically, for research around health and humanities.

One thing that I don’t know if that research always attends to is that this type of writing where you can just sit down and let yourself flow. The idea flow is actually a kind of psychosocial concept, the idea of a flow state. And whenever you can get in that flow state; one of my colleagues who’s an occupational health expert tells me this, It’s beneficial. The more time you can send in a flow state in a day, the better.

So I think the problem during a pandemic is that we’re not in flow state, right? Even if we’re doing one thing, we’re thinking about a million other things like “where can I get toilet paper?”, “Do we have enough food?”, and “Should I be getting some more masks for my family?” or “what’s going to happen with daycare?” And so having a time where you can sit down and get in that flow state and write seems like it’s especially beneficial right now. It offers a bunch of different aspects for a humanistic perspective. The idea of how people are reacting to it personally.

Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Michael Emch 1

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

Michael Emch combines expertise in epidemiology and geography to track the spread of infectious diseases. His team is mapping over space and time where COVID-19 testing has occurred. This information, combined with other data, helps determine where testing deserts might exist. Dr. Emch studies the disparities in testing: who got tested, how often and where and when those tests took place.

Michael Emch

I direct the Spatial Health Research Group using our expertise in disease ecology and spatial data science. We do collaborative research in public health, medicine, and geography. And so our group is involved with many studies including several on COVID-19. So, for instance, we’re conducting analysis of large datasets in North Carolina, including how many people were tested for COVID-19: how many people had it, where they lived, or where they were treated, how old they are. We also map over space and time where testing occurred over the last few months. And the testing data, we combine them using geographical methods with other datasets, such as census data, and this will help us determine where we might have testing deserts. We identified testing deserts that will help us understand where disparities exist for who gets tested, such as urban-rural differences, socioeconomic disparities in testing, racial ethnic disparities in testing. My subfield is called medical geography, or some people call it health geography and in that field we study human environments interaction and how it can lead to disease incidence.

When I talk about human environment interaction, we look at the social and built environment, such as things like segregation or violence and social support within neighborhoods, such as churches and other institutions. But we also study the biophysical environments because it helps us understand who gets some diseases like malaria or cholera, which are linked to the environment. We look at environments and human interaction holistically.

Host

Dr. Emch and his team are beginning to analyze the testing in North Carolina and the country at the beginning of the pandemic.

Emch

We’re just beginning to work on looking at the disparities in testing and the disease burden. And so I have different hypotheses about why. The reason why more Latinx people might be hospitalized might be related to comorbidities. The more Latinx people that have been exposed to the disease and have tested positive might be related to their work environment. There is a higher proportion of people working in, for instance, the meatpacking industry, and it may be occupational in nature, the transmission, but it also could be the conditions in which they’re living that may be crowded, which is difficult to social distance.

And so I don’t have any conclusions, but we are starting to analyze those data now. And those are just hypotheses at this point. So the massive differences in hospitalizations, for instance, would be related to sort of structural differences in populations. There’s no question that we could have and should have done more testing at the beginning of this pandemic in the United States. And our job is actually to reconstruct how much testing there was in different places in North Carolina.

I’m interested in figuring out how many people are tested over space and time from the time the pandemic started in North Carolina until now. We have the data and we’re analyzing those data. And we also have data on something about the individuals who were tested. Not just where they were living and where they were tested, but we also know something about their socioeconomic status. But we don’t know the answer yet because we haven’t analyzed the data enough to be able to tell you the answer.

Blouin

Focus Carolina Special Edition: Michael Emch 2

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

When he interviewed for the position at Carolina, Dr. Emch found this new opportunity the perfect fit for his career path and passion for research in epidemiology.

Michael Emch

There were three things that make, still to this day, Carolina unique for me, and those are the Carolina Population Center, which is the top population center in the country. It’s a research center that has helped facilitate interdisciplinary research such as I do, and including research about health, population and the environment. And the center not only provides this interdisciplinary scholarly environment, but it also takes care of the administrative burden of research so we can just focus on the science, which is what I really want to do.

Second is that Carolina has a top geography program with a Ph.D. program that includes doctoral students and great undergraduate students and postdocs. And then the third is the Gillings School of Global Public Health is a top public health school in the country. And it also has a top epidemiology program and one that’s really good at infectious diseases. So it’s the trifecta. My home: It’s a perfect place for me as a scholar and a teacher.

Host

In his 15 years at UNC, Dr. Emch has taught mostly graduate classes, but he is looking forward to his second straight year of introducing undergrads to his work.

Emch

I am going to teach a class on disease ecology, which is a first-year seminar, and so it will be a small class of first-year students and we are going to talk about four different diseases. COVID-19 will have a big part of this class. We’ll talk about the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. We’ll talk about the spread around the world. We’ll talk about pandemic preparedness or lack thereof. And then we’ll talk about malaria and cholera, which are two diseases that I study a lot, as well as HIV, which is one that’s not related to the biophysical environments. It’s more related to the social environment.

So that is actually the first time at Carolina in fifteen years that I will have ever taught a first-year seminar. Last semester, I taught a class called Health and Medical Geography. It is an undergraduate class that focuses on all of these things that I talked about today, including disease ecology. And so in the midst we have this new outbreak of emerging infectious diseases. And I actually wrote a book called Health and Medical Geography, which is the textbook for the class.

And in the midst of this class, we saw COVID-19 happening. And we just so happen to be studying the chapter on emerging infectious diseases. So we’ve got to study at real-time and each day I would read The New York Times or whatever source the modeling studies that came out of Imperial College, London and the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at University of Washington. So I actually changed the curriculum mid-semester and had students reading these modeling reports and we were studying the types of models that they were using that were in the news and things like that. So that was a very interesting semester.

I’ve been using Zoom forever because of all of my international work. I was worried that the entire system was going to crash around the country because all of a sudden there were millions and millions of people using it. The technology worked really well. It was a class with about 50 students. And I tried to get the students to interact as much as possible. And we probably talked about COVID 19 about half of the time during the online education portion of the course. Graduate classes in this area of study is something that I do more often than teach these undergraduate classes. But the undergraduates were amazing last semester.

Blouin

Focus Carolina: Rebecca Tippett 1

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

As the director of Carolina demography, Rebecca Tippett says the 2020 Census is critical. The data gathered will be used to determine if North Carolina gains a seat in the House of Representatives, and to be sure the communities get their fair share of federal funds for schools, hospitals and roads.

The deadline for the 2020 Census has moved around due to political wrangling, and Dr. Tippett and her team are working hard with the Census Bureau to help North Carolina sign up as many residences as possible.

Rebecca Tippett

So it was originally extended to October 31st. That was kind of verbally committed to and then walked back due to a series of lawsuits. There’s now kind of a stay on this stop. We are planning for September 30th, but we’re hoping for October 3rd.

So the census is constitutionally mandated to be a count of the population. The Bureau is supposed to deliver a count, an apportionment count to the president by December 31^st, and it’s a count of the population on April 1st. I think the Bureau has a fair amount of discretion to set the date, but that’s also contingent upon approval from Congress.

So the census is the once a decade count that the government does of all Americans. It’s literally the most democratic and inclusive thing that we do as a country, and it’s vitally important to the function of both a representative democracy as well as the federal, state and local government, and then through everything else into research and business. So the census is used to allocate the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, of which North Carolina is predicted to pick up a 14th feet. And it’s also used to allocate over one and a half trillion dollars of federal funding annually, which North Carolina gets about 44 billion dollars a year.

From there, it’s used to allocate the fair distribution of state and local money and it’s used in everything from planning for disaster responses like hurricanes or the global pandemic that’s going on to understanding where and why should you open a new business.

Host

Due to the pandemic, the Census Bureau has had to ramp up what it calls “doorknockers” to visit homes in communities all over the state and close an important gap.

Tippett

North Carolina has been lagging its 2010 response rate quite significantly. It’s still about four percentage points below where it was in 2010. We’re also lagging the nation more than we did in 2010. So it’s fairly traditional for us to be a little bit lower, but this year we are lower than we would have expected. We’re seeing that although Internet communities are significantly lagging in census response compared to our higher Internet communities, we’re seeing that more broadly across the southeast, that North Carolina, like many southeastern states, have seen these lower patterns of response.

This is the first online census where most Americans are invited to respond online, and has really complicated that because the in-person outreach that had been planned was put on the back burner or canceled completely because of the COVID-19.

The first few months are what’s called the self-response period. So that’s where you or I can fill out the census for ourselves and our household. And the reason why we want that is it’s the cheapest way to collect the data. It’s also the most accurate way to collect the data. So when we’re talking about getting a complete and accurate count, we really want to see high self-response. But we also have a period called the nonresponse follow up period, because as much as we like to get households to respond on their own, many households do not. In 2010, only about 65 percent of North Carolina households self-responded. Right now, we’re at about 61 percent have self-responded in 2020. And the nonresponse follow up operation is when doorknockers go door to door. Typically that hiring and training would have been going on, but the hiring and the training was put on hold because of the pandemic and then they did not start the door-knocking operation until August 11th.

So what we’re seeing right now is that despite all of our efforts, the gap between North Carolina’s self-response rate and the national average has widened in the past few weeks. So as a result, 85 percent of national households have been counted. In North Carolina, it was only like 76 or 77 percent. So we’re seeing a widening gap between the percentage of households counted nationally and those counted in our state, which puts North Carolina and its communities at risk of an undercount. We might not get our fair share of federal funding or those communities might not get their complete representation when we go to redistrict next year.

Blouin

Thank you for listening to Focus Carolina, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. To hear more interviews, visit Chapelboro.com and click on 9.79 The Hill on demand or visit thewell.unc.edu.

Focus Carolina: Rebecca Tippett 2

Provost Bob Blouin

Host

As the director of Carolina Demography, Rebecca Tippett says the 2020 Census is critical. The data gathered will be used to determine if North Carolina gains a seat in the House of Representatives, and to be sure the communities get their fair share of federal funds for schools, hospitals and roads.

Dr. Tippett came to UNC after seeing a job posted at the Carolina Population Center that seemed like it was written for her.

Rebecca Tippett

The Carolina Population Center is over 50 years old, has a long and really great history of doing cutting edge population research at the national and the global level. North Carolina is a dynamic state, it’s changing. It has been changing a lot, particularly since the 1990s, and there was a tension, in that we have this premier global population research center at one of the state’s leading universities, and it was not well situated to answer questions from individuals within North Carolina about how and why their state was changing.

In the early 2010s, there became a proposal to found Carolina Demography. That unit, the initial formation, the job opening got posted sometime late 2012 or early 2013. I happened to apply, I saw it, and I joined UNC on July 1st, 2013, to really start the unit and try to develop it into something that could help leaders and citizens around the state better understand North Carolina and get their questions about population change answered.

The job opening description was just a perfect fit. I had been doing applied demography. I came from Charlottesville, the University of Virginia, where I’ve been working in applied demography, which is basically taking my training in sociology and demography and applying that to business or government or community problems and taking that same approach and using it, though, for kind of concrete shorter term deliverables.

And this was essentially that same sort of work in the next phase of my career, which would be not just working and establishing it, but really thinking about it in new and different ways. Obviously, the unit has shaped a little bit around what I was interested in, but that’s always been a collaborative effort with the Carolina Population Center. And over seven years we’ve grown from being the royal we, with a unit of one, to now there’s seven of us total in Carolina Demography, plus we have three student interns working with us this semester, so pretty substantial increase in the types of work that we can do now because of that growth.

Host

One of Dr. Tippett’s first projects at Carolina Demography was helping identify where students in the state were falling off the educational pipeline.

Tippett

One of the most exciting opportunities I had in the first few years of Carolina Demography was to get connected with the John M. Belk Endowment. And a few years ago, the John M. Belk Endowment, which is based in Charlotte, came to me and said, we really want to understand what’s going on in North Carolina with respect to its educational pipeline, because we’re hearing that there’s barriers to success and we know that we want to move the needle on these outcomes and improve outcomes for all North Carolinians, but we’re not certain where we should be investing and where we are going to get the most bang for our buck. In collaboration with them and with their support, we pursued a research project called North Carolina’s Leaky Educational Pipeline, and we evaluated from high school into the UNC and community college system how North Carolina students were doing and where there were opportunities for improvement and how those success outcomes varied.

From that, one of the biggest takeaways that we had was that there is no silver bullet. There is no single point that drives student outcomes. Rather, there are a series of transition points at which students are lost. And so what it shows to us is that there are multiple points to make improvements and the impact of the loss vary somewhat by region of the state to, in some parts, it’s transition to college is the biggest opportunity for improvement. In other places, we may see that a lot of students make it to college, but they don’t continue for their second year. And that suggests that there may be slightly different approaches or different programs that are needed, but that those then need to be regionalized or localized to really address the population that’s being served.