TEACHING A RACE AND DIVERSITY COURSE TO SCIENTISTS THROUGH SYSTEMS THINKING AND FEEDBACK LOOPS

A required course in race and diversity has been part of the Temple University curriculum since 1993. These courses emphasize intersectionality and explore the relationships among diversity, justice, and power. A newer course to fulfill this requirement focuses on the myriad ways racial and gender stereotypes have affected engagement in science and society’s perception of what it means to be an accomplished scientist. This course uses a systems thinking approach to teach about racism and disrupting racist systems. Earth science students are likely to be familiar with the feedback loop concept from learning about climate change, and this teaching approach enables them to build from a familiar and comfortable starting point as they find their way into the less familiar domains of scholarship around race and gender.

In 2020 and 2021, the course was taught without explicitly teaching students about feedback loops. From 2022 to 2024, a feedback loop intervention included use of mutual alignment to teach the structure and effects of positive and negative feedback loops, using comparisons between natural and social systems, and teaching of causal loop diagrams of racial equity feedback loops. Before and after using the intervention, the course required students to complete an essay that asks them to use leverage points to intervene in the inequitable Nobel Prize award system. Preliminary qualitative language analysis of the essays shows that while students before and after the feedback loop intervention use causal language, the use of language related to connectedness and change increased after teaching about feedback loops. Very few connectedness phrases were used in the control group, suggesting that feedback loop thinking may help students view these processes more as a system and less as simple cause and effect. Knowledge of feedback loops aids in identifying root causes of issues and developing effective solutions, rather than just addressing symptoms.

Teaching about racism and gender bias in the context of science adds relevance to students and provides them with tools to recognize complex systems across disciplines. Additionally, this teaching model uses an approach familiar to and comfortable for science students while also encouraging antiracist interventions.