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.

Vol. 22, No. 3

September 01, 2023

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History

Submitted: 8 June 2022

Revised: 4 April 2023

Accepted: 6 April 2023

Information

© 2023 A. E. Beatty et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2023 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 4.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0).

We would like to thank the Ballen lab for providing valuable feedback during the drafting of this article. We thank the iEMBER group for assisting with survey development and the iEMBER network for participating in survey piloting. We also acknowledge two anonymous reviewers who provided excellent feedback on versions of the article. Finally, we would like to thank the National Science Foundation for providing funding to A.E.B., J.A.H., and C.J.B. (NSF-DUE-2120934) and the iEMBER network (NSF-RCN-UBE-1919654).

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