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Culturally Affirming Assessments of an Inheritance and Traits Unit Through Genetic Raps
It is quiet for a beat after Muz stops reading. The moment could quickly pass unrecognized for what it is-a reclaiming of identity and a sophisticated display of her genetic knowledge. Then there are snaps, smiles, and shout-outs in her group: "G meant to be a T?! That's sooooo good!" Readjusting in her chair, Muz confirms that this is about a switch in her base pairs, about albinism, about her whiteness among her Black family. The group sits in her story.
Muz, and her peers, have just concluded the first ninthgrade biology unit of the school year by reading raps they wrote to demonstrate their learning about inheritance, traits, and identity. Starting the year with this was intentional. We did not want our students' first experience to be another biology unit that stopped short of naming and addressing issues of racism in science-developing credibility from a position of care was our priority. If we skirted or neglected the violent history of racism in/through the study of genetics, how could we claim to teach from a position of culturally relevant caring (Gay 2010)? We wanted to make our care for and allegiance to our Black and Brown students known from the start. Furthermore, we knew that teaching race as a societal construct, rather than a biological one, does little to disrupt racism. It is an approach that leaves students unprepared to be "Biological Antiracists" because their arsenals will still lack the scientific knowledge helpful for refuting racism and dismantling its influence (Kendi 2019). To effectively care for students of color, science teachers must give space for students to grapple with and speak back to notions that science and society are not raced concepts.
Furthermore, while drawing on storytelling and artistic expression is rare in science education, these modes helped us center what really mattered-our Black students' personal experiences and authentic connections to genetics and inheritance. By forgoing traditional assessments that reinforce white standards of knowing and being (tests, formulaic lab write-ups, etc.) (Syverson 2009; Bang et al. 2017; Trumbull and Nelson-Barber 2019) and aim for quantity over depth of understanding (Cintron, Wadlington, and ChenFeng 2021), we refuted cultivating uncritical lab geneticists. Doing this...
