School News: Studying Race as a Biological Concept
Spring 2022
This article appeared as “Race Matters” in the Spring 2022 issue of Independent School.
According to a 2019 Science Education article, education in genetics that challenges racial classification of human populations has been shown to reduce racial bias in adolescents and adults. With that in mind, two educators who were at Whittle School & Studios (DC) during the 2020–2021 school year wanted to explore the concept of race from a genetic perspective to help challenge preexisting notions about what it means from a biological perspective.
Balakrishnan Selvakumar, who taught upper school biology, and Ara C. Brown, who was assistant head of school, created a project in which biology students analyzed genetic data about human populations from scientific journal articles. The students asked questions about whether grouping people based on race is biologically accurate given the extent of genetic similarities between populations and differences within populations. They explored the impact of race on social justice and medicine. They also looked at the significance of examining larger regions of the DNA code of an individual versus smaller regions that code for characteristics like skin color.
Students presented their findings at a school assembly in 2020, and some submitted papers to Genomics: Insights, an online digital publication of the National Human Genome Research Institute; four were accepted for publication in the November 2020 through January 2021 issues. They detailed the significance of human genome-based population classifications, ancestry combinations in mixed populations and implications on disease susceptibility and medicine, and the difference between ancestry and race.
Selvakumar, who currently teaches at Polytechnic School (CA), and Brown, who currently works at Stratégenius, continue to think and have conversations with fellow educators about how high school biology can be used as an anti-racist educational tool. What’s happening at your school? Share your story with us at [email protected].