Teaching & Outreach
Making Undergraduate Biology Classrooms More Gender-Inclusive
Descriptions of biological processes have historically depended on gender normative language and attributes. For example, Emily Martin's work, which is foundational to this area of study, described how gendered stereotypes are used when describing reproductive cycles in biology textbooks, i.e. eggs are demure and passive, sperm is competitive and active. Not only are these portrayals often oversimplified or incorrect, they also reinforce gender norms and binaries. Numerous studies have documented that gendering biological processes has implications both in college classrooms and in the broader community. Based on this, we conducted a cultural analysis of the most popular introductory biology textbooks, collating patterns of gendered language use and offering potential solutions to each major area of concern.
This analysis is ongoing, but you can see a snapshot of what this work looks like in this correspondence piece: White, P. J. T., Masani, S., Shuster, S., and N. E. Wonderlin (2021) Ditch gendered terminology for cell division. Nature 599(7886):556-556. DOI |
Novel Approaches to Student Learning
More on this project can be found here: Rumfelt, K. E., Wonderlin, N. E., Hulbert, D., and P. J. T. White. 2020. From DNA Extraction to Sequence Analysis: A Semester-Long Undergraduate Research Project on Fish Mislabeling. American Biology Teacher 82(3):170-175. DOI
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Younger Learners & Community Science
Abundant, small, and accessible in many places, insects can be used as education tools to teach about biodiversity, plant-insect interactions, anatomy and physiology, appreciation for nature, and more. In this project, we worked with local elementary teachers to both bring insects to the students in their classroom, and bring students outdoors into carrying out their own experiments. In order to learn about the moths living in their community, students built their own moth traps and determined where they would like to place them to collect moths. As a team, we assessed what students were able to collect and drew conclusions about what we could learn from our data. For example, capturing more moths in traps in wooded than open areas may indicate that moths prefer areas with foliage to eat and hide in.
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More about this project can be found here: Wonderlin, N. E., Lorenz-Reaves, A. R., and P. J. T. White (2022) Habitats of urban moths: Engaging elementary school students in the scientific process. American Biology Teacher 84(5):284-289. DOI