A Science Education That Confronts Injustice
Science has dominated the headlines this year and continues to do so as we head into a school year marked by discussions about mask-wearing, social distancing, and maximizing air flow.
As a science educator and teacher educator, I’m concerned by the influx of confidently-stated claims I’ve seen rolling across my social media feeds. I see science positioned as an untouchable expert (“Science tells us…”) and a scapegoat (“Science got it wrong again!”).
But here’s the thing: science doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Science happens in real-time, by real people, and has real impacts. The science we learned in school hasn’t prepared us to interpret science, as it is happening, in a deeply divided world.
Now, science education needs to confront the implications of that.
The comfortingly certain science of the headlines becomes far less soothing when it is announcing stark disparities in care and outcomes. But I want the students that I work with to be able to interpret all of these stories.
A science education that studies the mechanism of a virus in a laboratory but ignores who has access to health care is missing a fundamental link in the scientific process. As students study models and infection rates, they also need to learn about the history of redlining and the economics of privatized health care. Alongside studying assays in HeLa cells, students need to learn about Henrietta Lacks and the history of using Black communities for medical experimentation.
Instead of another vignette about Watson and Crick, let’s have students explore #BlackinSTEM and #BlackinChem for real-time stories of Black researchers who are working on solving today’s pressing puzzles. And when they come across posts about racism encountered in the lab or field? Discuss those too. Incidents of exclusion and discrimination are as much a part of the history of science as Mendeleev’s element cards, and students deserve to hear the whole story of how we got to where we are today.
There are real benefits to learning about science as more than isolated mechanisms. Explicitly connecting science instruction to real-world problems can improve student engagement and narrow racial and gender gaps in science. Our own research in the Science in the City group at Stanford, led by Dr. Bryan Brown, found that teaching a science lesson through local issues helped students understand that science isn’t limited to the four walls of the classroom. And — critically — they started thinking about how they could contribute to change.
Fortunately, many resources are already available to support teachers in this work. The Learning in Places project offers frameworks for educators that can guide conversations about ethics, decision-making, and power in place-based science. Comics like Science Under the Scope by Sophie Wang can be paired alongside textbook explanations of scientific methods to spark discussions about what research projects get funded and why. Teaching Tolerance has published a framework of social justice standards that can be integrated into any subject, including science. These resources can help districts and teachers develop science units that support student learning about science concepts — and their place in the world.
Students need to learn how to tell the difference between rapidly shifting mortality statistics and the consistent account of structural racism they portray. When making decisions based on scientific data, context matters. History matters.
Science classrooms provide an opportunity to study not just facts, but also their origin and impact. It gives us a chance to teach students to interpret the rapidly developing scientific advancements — and how they might be applied. They can learn to ask: Who benefits? Who is harmed? Who do I trust?
When the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) were developed in 2013, it was an effort to reinvent science education to focus on scientific practices and processes, rather than isolated facts. Analyzing data and developing explanations became the core of K12 classrooms, and elementary students’ science achievement scores have risen alongside their critical thinking skills.
But we need to push even further.
Science isn’t a monolith. It’s not an expert or a scapegoat. It will, however, continue to show up in our newsfeeds as the Covid-19 pandemic continues into the fall. But, with a science education that explicitly confronts injustice, your children will be ready to tackle those headlines. They’ll ask questions instead: How were these decisions made? What values matter to the people making the decisions? Has something similar happened in the past?
And most importantly: What do I do now that I know this?
