Feminist Biology

The problems we face are not neatly packaged into disciplinary boxes; they exceed the frameworks that attempt to limit and contain them. Climate disasters, environmental injustices, public health crises, and inequitable access to healthcare are just some of the issues that must be addressed through transdisciplinary efforts to reveal the world as it exists in all its complexity rather than dissecting it into discrete fragments. Hudson’s teaching is in response to the resistance of traditional science education to situate scientific knowledge in its sociocultural context, and she argue for making possible opportunities for students to learn science through the critical lens of feminism to explore the intersections of science, technology, and society, given that the issues we face will not be resolved by working in silos. Despite the underrepresentation of feminist perspectives in science education research, she believes that the encounter between feminism and science can transform education.

The current moment offers an opportunity to develop critical information literacy skills needed to access information, evaluate sources, and synthesize knowledge, which is essential in our increasingly complex information networks wherein it can be difficult to differentiate fact from fiction. And it also offers the opportunity to develop scientific literacy skills to understand the process of how science moves from the laboratory to publication, how to access the primary sources that news reports on in brevity, how to understand and engage with scientific results, and how to share this knowledge with others. While lectures can be beneficial if enhanced with active learning strategies, forming a community of learners is key to learning in which students and teachers co-create knowledge, which serves to model the ways in which scientific knowledge production is a collaborative process. Hudson’s work aims to move students from being passive consumers of knowledge to active producers, as they develop skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis. Her curriculum design is organized around essential questions of the discipline to deepen understanding of a small set of core ideas specific to biology, while integrating skills that have applications across all disciplines, including asking questions, defining problems, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing data, constructing explanations, designing solutions, and communicating information. She makes use of case studies and discussions that require students to examine scientific problems while developing an appreciation for the relationship between science and society. Her teaching centers on the idea that students need a science curriculum that brings awareness of the technoscientific society in which they presently live and prepares them for the ways in which they are responsible for its future.