Lean into Grief and Fear: What the Early 2020s Taught Me About Teaching Diversity Courses Now

This reflective essay examines how the crises of the early 2020s reshaped my approach to teaching a required diversity course for teacher candidates at a Hispanic-serving university in Texas. Entering the profession during COVID-19 and amid increasing political restrictions on equity-focused teaching, I found that traditional multicultural education frameworks were insufficient for preparing teacher candidates to support diverse learners navigating mass trauma. This essay argues that emotional engagement is not ancillary but essential to preparing teachers for contemporary classrooms shaped by ongoing trauma. Drawing on social justice teacher education and critical emotion praxis, I redesigned the course to center loss, grief, and fear as pedagogical entry points into equity work. Using course artifacts, and instructional materials from 2021–2024, I analyze how talking circles, collage-making, cost–benefit analysis, and letter writing centered emotional understanding and reshaped approaches to instruction. I conclude by offering implications for teacher educators seeking to design diversity courses that address emotional, political, and ethical dimensions of teaching in the 2020s.