#649: Making Sense of Systemic Racism in a High School Biology Classroom: The “Just Genetics” Unit

Drawing on frameworks for Justice-Centered Pedagogy and Rightful Presence, we designed a genetics unit that engages students with reasoning about racial health disparities in the context of diabetes. The unit focuses on the relationship between past and ongoing structural racial inequities, the resulting non-neutrality of physical and social environments, and their outcomes for the health of marginalized communities. We provide a design story tracing our design conjecture, how we embodied it in learning activities and artifacts, and the ways in which these were taken up by high school students in terms of their understanding of the structural aspect of racism. Our findings suggest that while students recognized that racialized groups endure harmful environments, they did not fully grasp how historical and ongoing racism created and reproduces these environments.