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The Underrepresentation Curriculum

A flexible curriculum designed to help students critically examine scientific fields and take action for equity, inclusion and justice

Hello 2024! My New Year’s Resolution is to keep striving for equity and justice with my students, to keep building community with other folks who are doing this work, and to keep learning from my students about the sorts of conversations they feel are most relevant and engaging. If you haven’t yet used the Underrepresentation Curriculum (URC) resources this year, the start of a new year offers a great opportunity to look for space in your curriculum and see what values-aligned work might be possible.

-Moses, on behalf of the Editors

1. URC Unconference, Feb 24rd!

We are thrilled to announce that we’re once again hosting a URC-themed Unconference on February 24rd, 12 noon – 3 pm Eastern time.  For those unfamiliar, an unconference agenda emerges from the interests of the attendees: folks in attendance can propose a topic and others interested join and discuss. We did this last in 2021 and the turnout and discussions were amazing; topics included:

• “I haven’t used the URC yet and want to learn”,
• “Decolonizing the STEM Curriculum”,
• “URC in Elementary and Middle School”, and
• “The Dark Side of Big Data”.

Since the topics emerge from attendees, we don’t yet know what will be offered this year – but if there’s something you’d like to talk about, you can make it happen! The registration page is available online here. If you have colleagues or friends who you think might want to attend, even if they haven’t heard of the URC, please pass the link to them, too!

2. Revisions to Lesson Plans

We are continuing the work of updating the URC lesson plans to keep them relevant, and we are also expanding the lessons available as part of the URC. We’re currently updating the Affirmative Action lesson to respond to the significant US Supreme Court ruling in 2023, and getting closer to publishing our lessons on Colorism, the Myth of the Model Minority, and Socio-Economic Status. We’re also in the process of adding a new footer to all of our lesson plans to make it easier for educators to give feedback to improve the lessons in the future. This curriculum work is a volunteer effort, so we thank you for your patience with us as we do this important work… and, as always, if you make modifications in your own context that you think are improvements (as encouraged by our Creative Commons licensing!), please let us know!

3. Workshops and Presentations

Since our last newsletter, three of the URC Editors ran a workshop at the Winter meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers that was well-received. In addition to the Unconference on Feb 24th, several of us are also looking forward to sharing about the URC with our physics friends over at the Energy and Equity Project. If you know of a school, college, district, or professional organization that might want to hear from us, you can request a workshop or presentation using this form.

4. Expanding the Reach

Many of us do our URC implementation in the Spring, and so we are excited to dive in and see what it looks like this year. If you are in the same boat, consider using our pre/post survey with your students so you can see the powerful impact of these lessons. If you have colleagues who haven’t heard of the URC, please share our lesson plans and resources with them. If you have questions and want to talk to other like-minded STEM educators, the URC Slack is there for just that purpose. As justice- and equity-minded teachers, we’re making a difference, and our impact is magnified when we do this work collectively.

We are so grateful for your investment in transforming science education!

– The Editors of the Underrepresentation Curriculum

(Abby, Andrew, Chris, Clausell, Dana, Danny, Elissa, John, Loraine, Moses, Rachel, and Shinae)

A new school year offers us educators a new beginning, and a chance to take steps towards teaching in a way that aligns with our values. We hope that your year is off to a great start, and that the URC resources below are useful to you as you consider your curriculum and pedagogy.   1. The URC Continues to Grow We’ve added a new lesson plan, Colorism. It explores how colorism can contribute to the exclusion of potential great scientists. We are also nearing the completion of a lesson on the myth of the model minority.  In the past year, we’ve had 31,000 visitors to the URC website, and a recent tweet brought dozens more educators to our mailing list.  We’re excited to see this free resource finding its way to the teachers that need it.  Please keep sharing it with people in your community! 2. 2022 User Cohort Roughly 30 URC users met bi-weekly last Spring to dive deeper into the URC.  94% felt like it was a great use of their time, and the conversations were .  We’ll likely be running another opt-in user cohort this year, so keep your eyes on the URC User Slack for information if interested. 3.  Underrepresentation Curriculum Group on Slack Speaking of the User Slack, we’ve got an online community of more than 500 users ready to discuss all things URC.  We just started a new channel for Canadian URC users. Editor Danny is currently sharing how he’s using the URC with physics graduate students:         Next, we did the Data Analysis lesson. However, I mixed it up         a bit by showing some graphs that showed ethnic/racial,         gender, ability, and sexuality demographics for the USA, and         then challenged them to do some internet research to find the         information for physics. I think this makes sense because, as         physics grad students, they are beginning to see themselves         as part of the discipline, and I want them to think about how to         find this sort of information on their own. We (the Editors) are still trying to figure out how to get the most out of this community; if you’d like to join, you can follow this link…and if you’re new to Slack, this explainer might be useful. 4. Presentations and Professional Development Since our last newsletter, the URC Editors have run workshops at the 2022 Biannual Conference on Chemical Education and provided professional development for Math for America, Eckerd College, the Fred Hutch Science Education Partnership, O’Bryant High School in Boston, the New York City Department of Education, South Seattle College STEM and business faculty, and two-year college STEM instructors around the country.  These workshops are one of our primary means of spreading the word about the URC at the moment; if you know of a school, college, district, or professional organization that might want to hear from us, you can request a workshop or presentation using this form.  Thrillingly, we’re starting to see URC users like you running their own PD using our materials, too. 5. Contributing to Research We continue to be excited to study how URC lessons may benefit students. If you are in a position to do so, given your local constraints about sharing student information, we have developed a pre/post survey that can help provide us quantitative answers to some of our questions. Please contact Danny (danny.doucette@gmail.com) if you have any questions. We are so grateful for your investment in transforming science education! The Editors of the Underrepresentation Curriculum: Abby, Andrew, Angie, Chris, Clausell, Dana, Danny, Elissa, Johan, John, Moses, Rachel, and Shinae

A Note to Instructors on Using URC Lessons in 2021

Over the past year, lawmakers in states across the USA have introduced a series of so-called “Anti-CRT” bills. Their goal is to intimidate teachers and stymie discussion of racial and gender inequity, especially in schools. While the various pieces of legislation target a wide variety of beliefs and practices, many of the bills take aim at tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a complex and essential field of legal and educational scholarship. We acknowledge that ideas from CRT have been influential in the design of the Underrepresentation Curriculum (URC), and affirm the importance of CRT in the fight for racial justice in the USA. However, teaching the URC does not involve the teaching of CRT. Neither do the lesson plans of the URC require that instructors overstep new legal realities associated with Anti-CRT legislation as they seek to help students explore the origins of inequities in science and society.

We recognize that teachers might feel intimidated by these new laws and may feel reluctant to incorporate the URC in their classes. In this memo, we provide guidance to instructors who are considering using the Underrepresentation Curriculum and may be concerned about Anti-CRT laws in 2021 and coming years.

One suggestion is to focus the URC on helping students to investigate processes by which social injustice arises and to center lessons on productive discussion. As described in Lesson 0,

The leader’s job is to facilitate productive discussion, not to give answers… these lessons are designed to introduce students to perspectives they may not have considered.

Teachers should refrain from assigning grades to students for identifying “correct” answers. Instead, teachers should help students seek out reliable sources of data, construct methods for assessing the data’s validity, and form their own beliefs based on the data and discussion. The URC lessons encourage students to form and evolve their own beliefs about social injustices; it is not about indoctrination or assigning blame but, rather, learning together through exploration.  We believe students are capable of having honest and nuanced conversations about uncomfortable topics without immediately adapting the views of those around them – and if they are not yet capable, we need to help them become so.

The next suggestion is for teachers to familiarize themselves with the new anti-CRT laws (if any) that are applicable to your school. Note that not all states have anti-CRT laws. Here are some examples:

• In North Carolina, Bill 324 requires that public schools may not officially endorse “the belief that the United States is a meritocracy is an inherently racist or sexist belief, or that the United States was created by members of a particular race or sex for the purpose of oppressing members of another race or sex.”
• In Illinois, Bill 0376 mandates that a unit on Asian American history be included in a school’s curriculum. 
• In Texas, Bill HB3979 states that schools may not “make part of a course the concept that… with respect to their relationship to American values, slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to, the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.” 

Not all states are the same, and unfortunately, it falls on the teacher to check their own states’ laws and consult with their school administration to ensure they understand the current state of this rapidly-changing legal reality.

A final suggestion is to reach out to the parties that will be affected by the teaching of the URC. Teachers should check in with their administration to seek their support and to know if there are school-level requirements that need to be met. Another good idea is to let the students and families know in advance. As described above, the URC is designed to be inclusive and thought-provoking, and clarifying this while addressing students’ and families’ concerns ahead of time can help implementation to go smoothly.

As you prepare to teach the URC to your students, we hope you will remember thousands of other practitioners who are navigating similar issues as they work to help students learn about social inequities in their science classes. Join in the ongoing conversation in our Slack.

Finally, we encourage you to be brave. Much of the national conversation among the need for teachers to teach bravely has focused on the Humanities. In science, too, we need educators who are committed to looking critically at the world and telling the truth about it through our disciplinary lenses The world needs educators like you who are willing to help students ask thoughtful questions about who does science, why this matters and what we can do to build a more just and equitable world. We hope you’ll find that the URC offers an accessible and  impactful way for you to do just that.

Sign up at tiny.cc/URCunconference

Moses Rifkin, editor of the Underrepresentation Curriculum, will be giving an invited talk at the meeting of the Southern Ohio Section of the AAPT this weekend. Other speakers include Kathy Koenig and Adrienne Traxler, so it’s definitely worth checking out!

As a bonus, this will be the first talk in which Moses can show off the new website and lesson plans, so we’re pretty excited!

https://sosaapt.weebly.com/fall-2020-virtual-meeting—saturday-oct-24-2020.html