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Microbiology and technology of fermented foods
The revised and expanded text on food fermentation microbiology With this second edition of Microbiology and Technology of Fermented Foods , Robert Hutkins brings fresh perspectives and updated content to his exhaustive and engaging text on food fermentations.
eBook
A scientist like me: demographic analysis of biology textbooks reveals both progress and long-term lags
Textbooks shape teaching and learning in introductory biology and highlight scientists as potential role models who are responsible for significant discoveries. We explore a potential demographic mismatch between the scientists featured in textbooks and the students who use textbooks to learn core concepts in biology. We conducted a demographic analysis by extracting hundreds of human names from common biology textbooks and assessing the binary gender and race of featured scientists. We found that the most common scientists featured in textbooks are white men. However, women and scientists of colour are increasingly represented in contemporary scientific discoveries. In fact, the proportion of women highlighted in textbooks has increased in lockstep with the proportion of women in the field, indicating that textbooks are matching a changing demographic landscape. Despite these gains, the scientists portrayed in textbooks are not representative of their target audience—the student population. Overall, very few scientists of colour were highlighted, and projections suggest it could take multiple centuries at current rates before we reach inclusive representation. We call upon textbook publishers to expand upon the scientists they highlight to reflect the diverse population of learners in biology.
Journal Article
‘Happy Stories’ of Swedish Exceptionalism
Sexuality education (SE) takes place in fields of tension where biology, legislation, norms, and values intersect. Drawing on Ahmed’s phenomenological account of whiteness, this article examines how Swedish whiteness is constructed and reproduced within SE. In Sweden, SE is formalised as an overarching, subject-integrated knowledge area where the biology subject plays a crucial role in its delivery. To include a wide spectrum of SE, where both planned and unplanned aspects of teaching are considered, as well as tensions in the content, we have analysed eight semi-structured teacher interviews and five biology textbooks. Our analysis shows how Swedish whiteness is reproduced as a form of institutionalised orientation constructed by norms, social values, people, subject knowledge, policies, and legislation, all intertwined in a complex web. This web places SE, teachers, and pupils in a racial landscape that constructs and reproduces specific forms of Swedish whiteness by assigning each a position in relation to familiarity. This familiarity provides a taken-for-granted starting point in SE, where ‘here’ is constructed as a place of progression, openness, and possibilities for happy future sexual lives, while other places come to stand out as hyper-visible examples of the less familiar, less happy, and ‘far away’. From this outpost, teachers and biology textbooks construct and reproduce Swedish whiteness through ‘happy stories’ of Swedish exceptionalism. Although these positive messages in SE may stem from good intentions, our findings show that a colourblind view of racial hierarchies in the rendering of ‘happy stories, about, for example, gay rights, free abortion, and equality also contributes to reproducing whiteness and reinforcing ideas about race and Swedish exceptionalism in SE.
Journal Article
The Confounding of Race in High School Biology Textbooks, 2014–2019
Following on earlier examinations of biology high school textbooks’ handling of race, this study examines eleven biology textbooks, intended for US high school use and published between 2014 and 2019. It offers a close reading of these textbooks’ treatment of four topics that have been associated with race: genetic disorders, human origins, skin color, and eugenics, as well as the topic of race itself. While only one textbook has a section on “human races,” another nine refer directly or indirectly to race across these five topics. The textbooks’ treatment of genetic disorders gives a marked, if uneven, prominence to race and ethnicity. Their coverage of human origins and skin color largely undermines concepts of race essentialism and racial classification. At other points, the same textbooks introduce studies, questions, and concepts that reinforce the biological reality of race, much as was done by the textbooks of two and three generations ago. The study draws parallels between these textbooks’ decidedly mixed message on race and a similar stance present in the current biomedical research literature. In the face of this mixed message, three sets of pedagogical strategies—fact-checking, historical, and meta-scientific—are proposed that teachers might use with current biology textbooks to raise awareness of the varied positions that scientists have taken in the past and continue to take on questions of race and biology.
Journal Article
Health Education Concepts in School Biology Textbooks in the United States and Singapore
This study investigates the inclusion of health education concepts in biology textbooks in the United States of America and Singapore. It employs a content analysis methodology to examine biology textbooks, considering the theme as a unit and dividing health concepts into four main fields. The findings for both countries indicate that the field of diseases and epidemics occurred most frequently, followed by disease prevention and treatment, then environment. Finally, food and nutrition occurred least frequently. The overall scores for the textbooks of these two countries, with regard to the inclusion of health concepts, reveal a significant difference in favour of the USA. Based on these findings, the researcher recommends that school textbooks should increase their coverage of health concepts, especially in the fields of the environment and food and nutrition, in order to provide students with more accurate, reliable health information and experiences that are consistent with current needs.
Journal Article