Sam Long (he/him/his) is a high school biology teacher in Westminster, Colorado. He is a cofounder of genderinclusivebiology.com which is a site that provides educators, students, and families with information and lesson plans on gender inclusive biology. Listen or read his interview about making biology classrooms more gender inclusive below!
Interview Coming Soon!
Transcript
The following transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.
Sam: Hi, I’m Sam Long. I’m a science teacher at Standley Lake High School in Jeffco public schools and I’m cofounder of genderinclusivebiology.com. which is a website that provides educational resources for teaching accurate and inclusive content of gender, sex, and sexuality in the biology classroom.
Arpi: Hi, and I’m Arpi Grigorian and I am hosting most of Pathways in STEM this summer and I wanted to talk to Sam Long about his website, about what it means to have a gender-inclusive biology curriculum. And I also just wanted to give a shoutout that Sam Long is going to be speaking with us Saturday July 11th at 2 p.m. on zoom. And we’ll be providing a zoom link and password on our Instagram page and our Facebook page for you to join. So please do if you have the time. Sam is fantastic. And right now we’re just going to discuss a little bit about what gender-inclusive biology is. So give me some examples of what a gender-inclusive biology curriculum looks like in the classroom.
Sam: Gender-inclusive biology is all about teaching biology concepts in a way that is scientifically accurate and also inclusive of our students’ identities. So there are a lot of points in a typical high school or even middle school curriculum where you’re teaching about genetics, or you’re teaching about evolution or reproduction that most of the standard ways of teaching are oversimplifications of these concepts of gender and sex. So if a teacher is teaching out of a textbook or out of notes and saying well in genetics we have X and Y chromosomes, women are XX, men are XY. For one thing, that is a gross oversimplification of reality and I think at the high school level we need to be teaching more accurately and more inclusively. Because when you say that, immediately any of your students who are transgender or intersex or gender-nonconforming, they’re going to think “ok, so we’re supposed to be learning about humans, my teacher just said what should be true for all humans but that does not describe me, that does not reflect me.” And that’s going to make our students tune out. They’re going to think in some capacity “Well, what we’re learning about is not about me.” And there’s a better way to teach about that. There’s a way to teach infinitely more interesting concepts within genetics, within sex chromosomes. And our website aims to make available a curated set of resources for teaching that complex, interesting, and accurate and inclusive version of the biology curriculum.
Arpi: Can you give us some examples in biology where gender and sex don’t really present themselves in our paradigm of male and female, boy or girl, XY or XX that can occur in the natural world?
Sam: Yeah, we know that there are human instances of this. We know that there are transgender people whose XX, XY chromosomes may not match with what is expected, what is typical. And there are also chromosomal intersex traits who may have chromosomes that are different from XX or XY. Also in the animal kingdom we have a beautiful array of different variations here. We have for one, we have a species that don’t even have their sex determined genetically at all. There are reptiles whose eggs they lay, the sex that each egg develops into is not because of genetics, it’s because of the temperature in which they incubate and that plays a role in making sure the ratio of male to female reptile eggs is appropriate for the environment in which they’ll need to survive. For example, having more females in the population means that the reproductive capacity of the population’s gonna be lower right, because of gestation. And we also have species that can exist as just one sex. There is a population of salamanders that is all female. And the way that they reproduce is by essentially stealing genetic information from sperm of other related species. And we have tiny worms like C. elegans that have two sexes, but it’s not male and female, it’s male and hermaphrodite, the latter being able to self-fertilize if they’re not finding a mate within their lifetime. So we have that diversity there and it firmly points to the idea that diversity benefits populations, diversity is definitely the most interesting part of biology to study. And that to generalize things, and to try to fit animals and other living things into these human gender norms that aren’t even diverse enough to describe humans, I think that is doing a disservice when we teach animals as if they are like heteronormative humans. We need to be teaching about all living things in a way that centers diversity.
Arpi: Exactly. It’s just so interesting to hear you talk about the diversity in the animal kingdom because I know when I was in high school, like my teachers approached it in like a standard way. You know, talking about XY and XX chromosomes, and almost negating the more diverse aspects of how reproduction occurs in the animal kingdom and in biology and also within the human species, within ourselves like what reproduction is, what sexual reproduction is. There wasn’t a lot of diversity in that discussion. And I’m also wondering because we talked a little bit before about examples of experiments or exercises that can be problematic for students who are LGBTQ or come from LGBTQ families that can occur in a standard biology classroom. Can you give us some examples of what occurs and why it’s problematic?
Sam: Yeah. A lot of the times when the students are learning about evolution, there will be some activities where there’s a roleplaying where you are either a male or female member of the population and you’re trying to find a mate and reproduce and pass on your genes. And those aren’t inherently bad learning experiences, but the teacher needs to be very careful about the that way we present that and the choices that we’re giving our students and not forcing them to play a role that they don’t want to. And also in genetics, there’s a pretty common activity in genetics where students will look at a family tree in some way, sometimes their own family tree. Students are asked to go home and look at the genetically inherited traits within their family. That can sometimes put students who are LGBTQ or have LGBTQ families in a very difficult position if you’re not genetically related to both of your parents or anybody in your family that can be kind of awkward. It doesn’t mean that students shouldn’t look at families, but students need to be given an option, they need at least for their teacher to acknowledge that not everybody goes home and sees the same patterns of genetics in play. And they need for their teacher to acknowledge that there’s a difference between the genetic concept of a family and the social concept of a family and that both are valid and that there’s a difference. There are other less common things, there’s labs that you can do in a high school where students look at their cells under a microscope and you can see how many X chromosomes you have. That is not appropriate to be doing in a high school classroom. That’s putting students in a position where they could potentially find out that they don’t have the karyotype they thought or students who know that they are intersex could be forced to have that revealed in the classroom and that’s not something that us as general education teachers are prepared to counsel students on.
Arpi: So we talked about how truly diverse biology can be, we’ve talked about some problematic exercises that standard biology classrooms put students in or biology teachers can create. And the unusual circumstances that can put LGBTQ students or just any student in. How can students engage with their teachers and communicate “Hey, that exercise is a bit problematic.” Or what if they’re interested and want their teachers to adopt these more diverse perspectives in teaching biology. How can they convince teachers to adopt these more gender expansive curriculums and gender diverse curriculums?
Sam: First, if you’re a student that’s listening in and wants to talk to your teacher about this, first I think that is a really great act of courage immediately to be thinking about that. As students, you’re not in a position of power in your classroom. There’s a tendency to kind of just go with whatever the teacher’s doing, not wanting to question that power. It’s good if you’re thinking about doing that because there are many biology teachers that haven’t given a moment’s thought to this and for their student to approach them, that would be something that really makes them think and reconsider what they’re doing. So if you’re thinking about talking to your teacher about the curriculum and ways in which it’s not helping you as an LGBTQ students and ways in which you wish it would change, first I would suggest not having that conversation during class because it can be kind of a complex conversation, but outside of class. And having that conversation starting with common goals and common values. And so your teacher presumably wants for every student to feel comfortable and heard and able to learn to their best ability. And you as a student want to feel comfortable, feel seen, and able to learn. So start by establishing that. And then tell your teacher exactly what it is, what activity, what language was used that is causing a problem for you. It’s important that they know that and teachers are able to take criticism. They get it from their administrators and everything. For them to hear that from you, for them to see the impact it has on your learning, on your well-being will be really powerful for them. And then provide an alternative way for them to teach that same topic. And if you go on our website genderinclusivebiology.com, we’ve curated a set of resources. Some are ready to use lessons and activities that can replace some of those problematic, over-generalizing concepts that are taught. So we have a website where it simulates myosis in a way that you are splitting up the sex chromosomes, X and Y. But it’s showing the fact that genetic sex is not always the same as gender identity. And it’s showing the fact that karyotypes other than XX and XY can happen and are surprisingly common. We have activities where your teacher, if they’re not an expert on the diversity of the animal kingdom, they hadn’t heard of those forms of the fish and the non-heteronormative sexual behavior, we have resources compiled at all levels from elementary to high school with sources where you can give your teacher that and they can use that to plan a lesson around. So advocate for that. Look for small changes that can become big changes. Because I think that once a teacher sees the impact that this can have on students, they really notice. When I start to shift from talking about something traditional to talking about something about gender and sex in biology and acknowledging the complexity, you really notice students change their posture and pay more attention and care more about that. So when your teacher sees that, I think that they will understand the impact that this is having and they’ll certainly appreciate you having spoken to them.
Arpi: Alright, well thanks for talking to us Sam.
Sam: Thank you for having me. Looking forward to the talk on Saturday.
Transcribed by Sophia Ulmer