Curriculum & content

5) Students learn how stem disciplinary knowledge, systems, and structures can be used to benefit or harm specific communities and ecosystems.

Students acknowledge how specific knowledge, systems, and/or structures may have benefited some at the expense of others and the communities in which they live.

• Read Tema Okun’s article What is White Supremacy Culture? and engage with the characteristics to consider antidotes in your classroom and/ or discipline.

• Read “That is Still STEM”: Appropriating the Engineering Design Process to Challenge Dominant Narratives of Engineering and STEM. Article considers the critical roles teachers plan in challenging dominant STEM narratives. 

• Read Acknowledging and Supplanting White Supremacy Culture in Science Communication and STEM: The Role of Science Communication Trainers. 

Students have opportunities to learn how scientific knowledge, embedded within white-dominant cultural structures and values, has disadvantaged other peoples and cultures.

• University of Michigan Practicing Anti-Racist Pedagogy overview, defines anti-racist pedagogy and contrasts with inclusive pedagogy. Includes a resource guide as well as an activity guide for implementing ideas in classes and courses. 

Students explore a current event in which related disciplinary STEM knowledge has been used to harm communities.

• Show the real-world application of knowledge and skills students use in the course that have been used to benefit or harm communities (e.g., videos, stories) and ecosystems (e.g., pictures, statistics, readings, podcasts).

• A Timeline of Scientific Racism provides specifics about racism within scientific disciplines. 

• The Anti-Racist Curriculum Project Guide provides resources for ensuring curriculum is anti-racist including ideas about how to include students in curriculum design.

• The Underrepresentation Curriculum provides resources for having students consider who does (and does not) participate in STEM as well as topics relevant to underrepresentation.