Self-lessons: Expanding the range of my writing
In January, I started building a website after joining a team to provide unbiased, scientific evidence that teachers could use to expand student discussion around natural examples of gender, and sexual diversity.
Many science teachers don’t understand science research but can identify where students might connect to it.
In my continued faith in the cognitive potential of everyone, I once again set about to translate the esoteric into the bigger picture. I still read, heard, or saw teacher moves and language that a friend described as “Disney-levels of villainy”:
High school science teachers comfortable using language that unnecessarily emphasizes the marginalization of understudied populations in scientific and medical research. Using percentages is todavía mejor que “tiny”; still accurate.
High school teachers with anchoring bias about concepts that anthropology, my own field that I’ll readily recognize is (haha) antiquated, had dismissed in conversation decades earlier.
Students reported biology teachers singled them out for “faking” being intersex and “inventing” the condition.
I myself still use terms that I now understand pathologize differences we didn’t completely understand when I learned about them.
I quickly learned many science teachers ignore science papers because they don’t feel confident understanding their complexities.
Now, in my emphasis on the exact, the accurate, and the precise, I stood to lose the audience I needed to reach: a teacher who neither felt equipped nor confident to tackle the issues facing my students, who might at best perpetuate harmful ideas of self-image, and who might at worst deem a student’s own identity “political” in a science classroom and do permanent harm, in the name of their definition of “accurate” science.
Compromise for the sake of harm reduction.
I identified any incorrect assumptions that might make my message a nonstarter, that science teachers:
emphasize students asking authentic questions,
are or come from a research- or science-oriented background,
have experience or often reflect on teaching, trauma, or intersectionality,
think in terms of the bigger picture of education,
work in a supportive environment for recognizing all student diversity, and
are open to learning & challenging own practice for the sake of better understanding students.
I defined my priorities:
harm reduction for students currently in classrooms,
promote a more accurate and less reductionist biology curriculum,
empower teachers to open the conversation to curiosity about unexamined evidence & encourage student inquiry, and
emphasize student agency to define their future society.
I’m making progress on improving how I:
define my writing goals based on my audience’s basic background knowledge,
balance scientific accuracy with reductionist guidelines by directing audience to further resources,
triage my writing’s intended impact based on market penetration of my medium, and
trust teachers to know which resources to use to what extent in their own classrooms and their own practice.
I have a lot more work to do!