Pandemic storytelling and student engagement: how students imagined pandemics before COVID-19 pandemic

Student engagement is one of the critical issues in science classes. This commentary explores the value of storytelling in microbiology education and student engagement. It is a result of an undergraduate exercise, where students were asked to draft short stories on pandemics before the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e. conducted in 2016-2019). The analysis of student writings (total of 244 short stories) aimed to understand the students' perception of pandemics, the diseases they chose to write about, and their level of knowledge of pandemics. Interestingly, 56.6% of students chose viruses to be the cause of their pandemics, 35.7% chose bacteria, 4.5% chose parasites, and a single student chose a fungus. Respiratory mode of transmission was the top pick in the stories (30%), followed by fecal-oral route, sexually transmitted, and skin-to-skin contact. Therefore, their choice of respiratory diseases as the focus of their short story may suggest their limited understanding of pandemics beyond such diseases. The varying levels of detail in the stories suggested that storytelling could be insightful in identifying knowledge gaps and engaging students. Two exciting questions remain: (1) For the students who wrote those short stories before the COVID-19 pandemic, how did they feel when it hit? (2) If the students are asked again to write a pandemic short story, what would it look like nowadays? A deeper understanding of epidemiology and the social impact of pandemics is crucial for developing effective pandemic preparedness and response plans, and undergraduate courses can play a vital role in this endeavor. Overall, this commentary highlights the value of storytelling in engaging students to assess their knowledge of specific subject matters.