Closeup Of US Currency, TFP File Photo. By Robert Schmad, DCNF. The federal government funded a 2023 academic conference focused on “re-imagining”
The federal government funded a 2023 academic conference focused on “re-imagining” college-level biology teaching by incorporating “social justice,” according to a federal spending database.
The conference, “A New Vision for Change: Re-imagining Biology Education Through Social Justice,” received roughly $120,000 in funding from a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant.
It purports to have “focus[ed] exclusively on investigating how attention to social justice issues can inform improvements in undergraduate biology learning and teaching,” according to the grant’s description.
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Topics of discussion at the June 2023 conference included “theorizing black unspeakable joy and its implications for the future of STEM education” and “vlogging on social media to diversify STEM identity development,” according to the conference’s website.
One talk was titled “gender-inclusive adaptations to biology teaching: language, concepts, and impacts.” It was hosted by Sam Long, a member of Gender Inclusive Biology, which is a group that focuses on addressing questions like “how can we affirm our transgender and intersex students when we talk about X and Y chromosomes?”
Another session covered “society’s educational debts due to racism, sexism, and classism in biology student learning,” while another touched on how biochemistry curricula can be re-tailored to incorporate “dialogues on anti-racism, equity, and social justice,” according to the conference’s website.
The conference also held discussions on “exploring a more inclusive approach to biology education through the lens of rural and indigenous ways of knowing” and incorporating “indigenous science” in biology education.
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Promoting “indigenous knowledge” has been a priority of the Biden administration. Biden ordered agencies to include indigenous knowledge in their decision-making processes in a 2022 memo and awarded more than $800 million in grants and cooperative agreements that apply indigenous knowledge to various issues.
The Biden administration defines indigenous knowledge as “a body of observations, oral and written knowledge, innovations, practices and beliefs developed by Tribes and Indigenous Peoples through interaction and experience with the environment,” according to the memo.
The federally-funded social justice conference coincides with a broader push by the NSF to integrate diversity, equity and inclusion into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. The agency runs a multi-million dollar “Racial Equity in STEM Education” program that awards grants to institutions undertaking programs aimed at incorporating DEI into the academic sciences.
The NSF and Gordon Research Conferences, the organization that held the conference, did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
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