A Social Justice Biology Curriculum to Strengthen Community College Students’ Critical Consciousness

The existing body of research presents two contrasting views of community colleges, one portraying them as a “second chance” for individuals, offering an accessible route to higher socioeconomic status. The second views community colleges as a deceptive cover designed to divert marginalized people away from prestigious colleges and to “blue-collar” occupations. Drawing inspiration from Paulo Freire’s concept of critical consciousness, I propose a third perspective, a liberatory viewpoint. This approach involves offering an education that raises students’ awareness and empowers them to enact positive transformations in their lives. Looking to nurture critical consciousness in science majors, I infused the traditional biology curriculum with social justice issues in two Biology II sections at a community college in the Midwestern U.S. with an institutional focus on healthcare careers. Based on conversations with students, I selected issues directly connected to their communities and biology and healthcare as the core of three lesson plans: climate change and food apartheid, environmental justice, and biases and racism in science and healthcare. This study examined two questions. First, how do the affordances and challenges associated with integrating social justice issues relevant to science into the biology curriculum create possibilities for liberatory education in community colleges? The second addresses how community college students exhibit critical consciousness while demonstrating and integrating scientific understandings as they make meaning of social justice issues in a biology course. Critical race theory, critical consciousness, and justice-centered science pedagogy frameworks guided my exploration of the answers. The data suggested that despite the challenges, there are multiple affordances in developing and implementing this type of curriculum for both learners and educators. Also, students exhibited three components of critical consciousness while engaged with the social justice-imbued lesson plans. However, as Freire saw the ability to read the world as a preliminary step for reading the word (or at least simultaneously occurring), my analysis implied that students’ accurate comprehension of the [biological] word developed together with critical contemplation concerning the roots and repercussions of social justice issues within the realms of science and healthcare (i.e., reading the world).