Despite increased awareness of the lack of equity and inclusion in the STEMM classroom, lessons on DEI topics are treated as separate to the scientific curriculum being taught. Rarely are intentional reflections and conversations on the lack of representation integrated into the lessons themselves. This lesson, titled “Discovery and Invention”, was developed to guide students through an exploration of the history of a topic—in this case, fermentation—followed by reflections and discussion on the culture of science and how it highlights certain individuals over others. Reflections allow students to explore and discuss their own scientific self-identity and sense of belonging in science. This fermentation lesson was designed to be integrated into a unit introducing students to microbial ecosystems, but it can be adapted for other topics as well, to suit the instructor’s needs.

Primary Image: Rosalind Franklin with microscope in 1955. MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 Downloaded from commons.wikimedia.org on November 1, 2021 by authors.

This lesson focuses on urbanization and its negative effects on species, specifically amphibians. The lesson will also provide hands-on statistical analyses and critical thinking questions to promote a better understanding of this ecological problem.

Dr. Christopher Schell is an ecologist who uses a variety of techniques to study mammalian carnivores in urban areas. This scientist spotlight uses graphs from his study on parental habituation to human disturbance in coyotes.

Presented at NABT 2019, we demonstrate how the Population Dynamics Click & Learn resource can be customized for any organism - using the Lionfish invasion as an example

This web page contains materials created by faculty of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of Mathematics to teach basic fundamentals of mathematical epidemiology.

There is a growing call to decolonize curricula in academia, including in scientific disciplines. In the biology classroom, this includes highlighting a diverse array of scientists and illuminating injustice and exploitation carried out by Eurocentric biologists and medical professionals. Despite this general roadmap, literature presenting and assessing classroom modules on decolonizing science is lacking. Here, I present an activity designed to shed light on the deep, historical relationship between natural history collections and the exploitation of slaves and Indigenous peoples and encourage students to critically evaluate how society influences science. Due to COVID-19, this activity was conducted remotely and included two synchronous discussion sessions and three asynchronous homework activities for Mammalogy students. Assignments were evaluated for student outcomes including reflections on their previous educational experiences related to the unjust history of science and engagement with decolonial theory. In the four homework questions in which students could interpret and answer from either a biological or decolonial perspective, 84% of students offered at least one response consistent with decolonial theory. Based on student responses, this three-week module successfully engaged upper-level biology students in decolonial thinking.

Primary image: A blue monkey (Cercopithecus mitis) skull collected from South Africa for the zoology museum collection in 1984. Image courtesy of Phil Myers, animaldiversity.org, Creative Commons.

Runoff in urban areas is an increasingly important issue when it comes to water quality. It is a major hydrologic issue in New York City, as urban infrastructure creates excess runoff and impervious surfaces decrease the infiltration rate of land surfaces. This excess runoff, which often times carries with it pollutants and contaminants, has proven to create water quality issues. It has become ever more critical to try to mitigate the influx of runoff into our waterways. Urbanization increases runoff, and in NYC 64% of the area is impervious. In this module students will explore green roofs as a potential solution to the environmental impacts of increased precipitation brought on by climate change. They will evaluate data collected from studies on 15 green roofs from different areas of the US and other countries, as well as historical precipitation data from Central Park in NY to illustrate how precipitation patterns are changing and if we need to use green infrastructure, such as green roofs, to combat the symptoms of climate change. Students will also use Model My Watershed , a watershed-modeling web app, to analyze real land use data, model storm-water runoff and water-quality i

Traditional Ecological Knowledge is based on deep understanding of systems from observations made over hundreds to thousands of years. This resource connects Traditional Ecological Knowledge to modern conservation through media and primary literature interpretation. The adaptation of this research aims to link the material to the ecological concept of the intermediate disturbance hypothesis and to highlight ecologists whose careers have focused on the concept.

The issues of redlining and environmental justice will be introduced and used as a framework for a number of topics in the third part of the semester in a non-majors Environmental Science course.

Materials for the workshop on social justice presented at the 2021 BIOME Institute.

Workshop about models for introducing social justice issues into classes developed in a Faculty Mentoring Network. Presented at the 2021 BIOME Institute.

Basic data handling and data analysis skills are introduced to visualize and analyze ‘big data.’ Environmental justice is introduced to give students an understanding of tools and strategies to explore while developing advocacy and communication skills.

This exercise explores circumstances of urban heat islands in the United States using spatial data, including an exploration of heat island solutions.

In this exercise, students use a combination of publicly available data and tree cover data that they generate using iTree Canopy to test whether tree cover is equitably distributed within the city of Dallas.