Biology Instructors See Value in Discussing Controversial Topics but Fear Personal and Professional Consequences

Abstract

Traditional biology curricula depict science as an objective field, overlooking the important influence that human values and biases have on what is studied and who can be a scientist. We can work to address this shortcoming by incorporating ideological awareness into the curriculum, which is an understanding of biases, stereotypes, and assumptions that shape contemporary and historical science. We surveyed a national sample of lower-level biology instructors to determine 1) why it is important for students to learn science, 2) the perceived educational value of ideological awareness in the classroom, and 3) hesitancies associated with ideological awareness implementation. We found that most instructors reported "understanding the world" as the main goal of science education. Despite the perceived value of ideological awareness, such as increasing student engagement and dispelling misconceptions, instructors were hesitant to implement ideological awareness modules due to potential personal and professional consequences.

FIGURE 1.

Instructors were asked to respond to the short answer prompt, “In your view, why is it important for students to learn science?” Responses were coded into categories, and response frequency is represented by increasing percentage of occurrence.

FIGURE 2.

(A) Instructors were asked to rate the importance of student exposure to ideological awareness materials on a scale of 1–10. Instructors rated importance at 8.19 on average, as displayed by the density plot. This was significantly and positively correlated with an instructor’s comfort level with ideological awareness and view of instructor responsibility to explicitly link (see “Teaching Style,” Supplemental Table 1) biological and societal topics. (B) Instructors were asked to report what percentage of their individual lower-division courses should be dedicated to ideological issues, and the average response was 23.36%. This was significantly and positively corelated with increasing proportion of lower-division courses taught by participants and their views of instructor responsibility to explicitly link biological and societal topics. (C) Instructors were asked to respond to the short-answer prompt: “What are the benefits of incorporating more ideological awareness resources in your lower-division course?” Responses were coded into categories, and response frequency is represented by increasing percentage of occurrence (see coding rubric in GitHub Repository Supplemental Table 3).

FIGURE 3.

(A) Instructors were asked to respond to the short-answer prompt: “Why don’t instructors use ideological awareness materials in biology classrooms?” See coding rubric in GitHub Repository Supplemental Table 3. Dot plots show the proportion of instructors responding from the perspective of disfavoring ideological awareness (light gray) and the perspective of favoring ideological awareness (dark gray). (B) Instructors were asked to respond to the short-answer prompt: “What do you fear is the worst-case scenario implementing ideological awareness material in your course?” All responses were coded into categories, response frequency is represented by increasing percentage of occurrence. (C) Venn diagram displaying the overlapping fears between socio-scientific issues (SSI) and ideological awareness curriculum based on this study and SSI systematic reviews (Nielsen, 2020; Chen and Xiao, 2021). Code definitions and examples from categories displayed in this diagram can be found in Table 2.