Not long ago, I met a group of high school students discussing ways to deliver edible vaccines using modified bacteria delivered in yogurt rather than injected with a painful needle.
Their iterative process of brainstorm, deliberation, and reflection illustrated important processes in learning. Their engagement seemed to evidence the power and potential of biodesign in pre-college (K-12) science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.
As biodesign teaching emerges from university and private settings into mainstream K-12 curricula, I question how to responsibly integrate it into education systems where inequity has persisted. We only have to look at computer science education in the United States to see the intergenerational injustice that results when stakeholders are not intentional about how and where new curricula are incorporated [1]. With biodesign this is complicated by the fact that no one has agreed on how best to teach it.
As educators, policy-makers, researchers, and students, we need to think carefully about who decides the goals of biodesign in education [2]. We must also pay attention to what these goals should be, for whom they are designed, and how they should be achieved. I am reminded of the dilemma in Plato’s Republic of selecting the philosopher-kings who are responsible for deciding what is socially good and the guardians tasked with adjudicating those ideals [3].
We might start to grapple with these issues by framing the goals of contemporary STEM education in order to situate biodesign within or beyond prevailing learning paradigms. These tend to fall along four themes—innovation, occupational, civic, and personal.
In the Innovation Frame for STEM, education seeks to create and sustain technical innovation, situating learners in research, experimentation, and material construction. This perspective has dominated contemporary science education (e.g., inquiry and project-based learning) for the better part of the 20th century [4]. I’ve seen these taken up in College Board and International Baccalaureate curricula that ask learners to pursue personal projects that involve designing experiments or building robots—tasks that are mostly aimed to create knowledge or products.
For the Occupational Frame for STEM, education supports economic participation in high-demand, science-based workforce pipelines, achieved through apprenticeships or internships that span advanced vocational and academic positions. I have seen this in curricula that emphasize technical language, skills, and practice in the context of a specific field.
The Civic Frame for STEM represents public knowledge as a channel for critical awareness and an ability to interrogate and make decisions about science, how it exists in the world, and how it impacts society and the environment. This includes learning activities that emphasize political activism, problematization of science, and classroom debate. An example I have seen in practice includes the controversial history of Henrietta Lacks and her HeLa cells [5].
Finally, projects in the Personal Frame for STEM are designed to facilitate delight in STEM activities. This includes using STEM for unmediated play, games, art, or other objects expressly for personal meaning. A great example is in MAKER education where learners can use materials like conductive thread, LEDS, and Arduinos to craft and program wearables.
It is no surprise that concomitant with these four framings researchers and practitioners alike have sought to develop curricula and tools to support these educational objectives. This effort has contributed also to what we call “science literacies”—operationalizations of STEM goals that are meant to help assess the extent to which they are achieved [6].
We might ask whether biodesign fits, extends, or contradicts these framings. All may simultaneously be true. That is to say that biodesign may not only reinforce what we know about best practices but also illuminate something about the learning process that other fields have not. Teaching biodesign could also uncover contradictions in STEM learning and force us to reexamine existing theoretical frameworks.
Ultimately, I am not sure how we might coalesce around science education goals. That said, biodesign educators should acknowledge the baggage and opportunities that come with STEM education as teaching techniques evolve to support a rapidly changing population in a rapidly changing world.
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[1] Margolis, Jane. Stuck In the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing. MIT Press, 2008.
[2] Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. Reprint 1997, MacMillan, 1916.
[3] Grube, G. M. A. Republic (Grube Edition). Hackett Publishing, 1992.
[4] Walker, Justice T. When Biology Learning Paradigms Shift: What Middle School Students Know, Think, And Learn About Synthetic Biology. 2019. University of Pennsylvania, Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3530.
[5] Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Crown Publishers, 2010.
[6] Scribner, Sylvia. “Literacy in Three Metaphors.” American Journal of Education, vol. 93 no. 1, 1984, pp. 6-21.
Justice T. Walker earned a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and is an assistant professor of STEM Education at The University of Texas at El Paso. With more than a decade of science teaching experience, Walker researches biology and computer sciences and their use in secondary education. He is a co-organizer of the Learn.Design.Bio workshop series and co-developer of bioMAKERlab tool and curriculum.
Cite This Essay
Walker, Justice Toshiba. “Biodesign Education: For What, Whom, and How?” Biodesigned: Issue 5, 21 January, 2021. Accessed [month, day, year].
