Integrating Racial Justice Into Your High-School Biology Classroom: Using Evolution to Understand Diversity

In this guide, educators and authors David Upegui and David E. Fastovsky offer a pedagogical prescription for how you can integrate the study of racial justice with evolutionary biology in your existing high-school biology curriculum.

Designed as a practical manual for teaching, the chapters focus on teaching concepts of equity through evolutionary biology modules, a cornerstone for building students’ scientific understanding of biotic diversity. The book provides pedagogical components alongside historical and scientific components, with contextual chapters that give teachers the background knowledge to understand the historical relationship between science and racism for topics such as natural selection, social justice, and American slavery and colonization. Ready-to-use lesson plans are situated in a historical and theoretical context of science as it relates to racial oppression, and demonstrate how rigorous science education can lead to your students’ liberation and personal empowerment despite the historically problematic history of some applications of science. These lesson plans and classroom exercises are presented in a way that introduces the timely extra dimension of anti-racism into the existing biology curricula without significantly increasing teaching loads. The contextual material provided allows the lessons to be implemented across a variety of classrooms regardless of initial familiarity with DEI.

Ideal for secondary biology teachers and their students, particularly in grades 10-12, this book synthesizes timely ideas for high-school educators, harnessing the power of rigorous science to combat marginalization. Lessons and activities have been classroom-tested and are aligned with three different standards: Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS); College board (AP Biology); Vision and Change; and use the 5E format.

David Upegui is a Latino educator, with 12 years of teaching biology in an inner-city US high school. He has won the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching and the Evolution Education Award [NABT].

David E. Fastovsky is Professor Emeritus of Geosciences at the University of Rhode Island, United States, where, for the past 36 years, he taught evolutionary biology and Earth and biotic history.