Developing and Teaching Curriculum to Reduce Genetic Essentialism in University Classrooms

Genetic essentialism is a social-cognitive prejudice involving the belief that people of the same race share genes that make them behaviorally, physically, and cognitively uniform and also genetically distinct from other other races, despite the fact that race and ethnicity are socially constructed categories that lack any biological basis. It can be exacerbated by a basic, Mendelian-based genetics and biology education. To combat this phenomenon, the Humane Genomics Literacy (HGL) curriculum was developed and has been highly effective in both increasing students' understanding of genetics and reducing students' belief in genetic essentialism. In this article, we focus on how to teach the HGL curriculum in the classroom. We carefully describe the original HGL curriculum in terms of content and the unique pedagogical practices that the curriculum includes. Next, we discuss how to adapt the curriculum for the university classroom. In doing so, we allow readers to see inside the HGL curriculum for the first time and to gain a better understanding of how each instructional support and each conceptual understanding are built from lesson to lesson. We aim to provide a guide for genetics educators who are interested in using HGL in their own university classrooms.