Associate Professor of Art History Susan Jarosi and Associate Professor of Biology Rhea Datta are among the co-authors of an article published recently in the journal Natural Sciences Education. “Sustaining socially just and accurate life sciences teaching for sex, gender, and reproduction?” resulted from a National Science Foundation-funded project that explored ways to improve equity in science education in those areas.
Jarosi was a co-principal investigator for the project that brought together an interdisciplinary group to examine biology subfields in which sex and gender feature prominently in the undergraduate curriculum. These fields include developmental biology, ecology, evolution, genetics, and physiology.
Jarosi had previously taught a course on “Seeing Gender: Gender in Visual Studies” at the University of Louisville (UofL) that included a unit examining visual representations of gender in science. A UofL colleague invited her to join the NSF project, the goal of which Jarosi said, “was to challenge the inertia hampering efforts to increase sex and gender inclusivity and redress the inaccurate and problematic normalization of the sex and gender binaries in undergraduate life sciences curricula.”
The article argues that modification of disciplinary content is insufficient for deep, lasting change and can even hinder broader transformation. The researchers found that while discrete improvements to course content are important, their interdisciplinary collaboration highlighted the need for broad, systemic reforms to promote more, and more lasting, socially just science.
They said that systemic-level challenges are even more apparent now, when national and state political agendas are actively preventing, defunding, and potentially criminalizing the accurate and inclusive teaching of biological complexity and diversity.
Posted July 11, 2025
