The stakes are striking when measured against the numbers. Although Black students enroll in four-year institutions in growing numbers and express strong interest in the biological sciences, only about 8 to 8.8 percent of biology bachelor’s degrees awarded between 2000 and 2024 went to Black students, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the U.S. National Science Foundation. That figure stands in sharp contrast to the 20 to 25 percent of Black students entering four-year universities who say they intend to major in biological sciences or another STEM field. The attrition is not a matter of ability or interest, the researchers contend, but of a STEM culture that treats white, middle-class male identity as its default norm and rewards competition, weed-out courses, and deficit stereotypes about Black learners.

STEM culture, as the study frames it, is socially constructed through disciplinary norms, values, beliefs, and practices that privilege Western and Eurocentric ideologies. Instructors often maintain color-blind approaches, avoid conversations about race, and fail to acknowledge anti-Black events in their classrooms. Faculty at institutions of every type, from historically Black colleges and universities to predominantly white institutions, have perpetuated negative stereotypes, encouraging Black students to change majors or abandon STEM altogether. Even at HBCUs, which generally support Black students more holistically, discrimination can radiate from STEM departments where faculty hiring patterns rarely reflect the students they serve. The result is a signal, repeated across campuses and disciplines, that Black students do not belong.

The REC Network emerged in response to these conditions as a multigenerational, interdisciplinary coalition of roughly forty Black biology faculty, researchers, professionals, community activists, cultural experts, and artists drawn from HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, R1 research universities, liberal arts colleges, secondary schools, and community organizations. Beginning with a virtual think tank in fall 2020, the group spent four years in workshops and small-group sessions practicing what its members call freedom-dreaming: envisioning introductory biology without systemic barriers. In fall 2023, a hybrid gathering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University brought participants together to draft Afrofuturist-inspired lessons on core topics such as mitosis, DNA, and cancer, work that continued through a 2024 preconference session with the International Conference on Urban Education.

The researchers analyzed the resulting curriculum materials using a deductive coding process anchored in six Afrofuturist principles drawn from the literature: alienation, Blackness, feminine identity, liberation, time, and futurity and worldbuilding. Four working groups, each with at least five participants deliberately paired across areas of expertise, produced lesson plans, slide decks, assessments, and supplementary resources. Four authors coded the materials independently, then met weekly to resolve disagreements and refine emerging patterns. Three final themes crystallized from the analysis: Reckoning with Black Marginalization, Reclaiming Black Legacies, and Re-envisioning Black Possibilities.

The first theme confronts students directly with how systemic racism shapes biological vulnerability. One lesson on cancer asks students to tell their own health stories or those of someone they know, connecting molecular concepts of carcinogenesis to societal, environmental, occupational, and genetic exposures that disproportionately burden Black communities. Another lesson examines Louisiana’s so-called Cancer Alley, where entire communities have been devastated by cancer and children are rushed to emergency rooms with asthma attacks, using the region as a case study in environmental racism. A reading on Henrietta Lacks, whose cervical cancer cells were taken and shared without her knowledge and became foundational to decades of medical research, introduces students to the history of medical exploitation and nonconsensual research practices that continue to shape distrust of medicine.

The second theme restores Black contributions to science that standard curricula have systematically erased. Lessons situate the story of Henrietta Lacks within the Afrofuturist principle of feminine identity, noting how her immortal cell line, which supported breakthroughs from chemotherapy and in vitro fertilization to gene mapping and vaccine development, embodies a nonlinear, almost boundless relationship with time. Students learn that her family, some of whom lacked basic needs such as health insurance, began seeking restitution in 2021 from pharmaceutical and biotech companies that profited from her cells. Other materials highlight a repository of one thousand current Black geneticists and community scientists, positioning ancestral knowledge alongside contemporary innovation. A performance task invites students to build a Black woman superhero grounded in the biology of mitosis, reimagining Lacks herself as a figure of futurity, creativity, and hope.

The third theme treats imagination as a productive cognitive stance rather than a distraction from rigorous content. A lesson on DNA uses genetically modified organisms as an entry point into structural inequities in food access, asking students to map access to fresh produce in their own communities as a practical strategy for resisting environmental racism and imagining sustainable, community-controlled food systems. A cancer unit titled Black Don’t Crack asks students to develop a multimodal offering depicting a post-cancer world, acknowledging the history, people, places, and practices that would change as a result. Students interview elders and family members to document intergenerational health narratives, and readings on sickle cell disease show how traveling clinics and community outreach can translate medical imagination into tangible interventions. Across these activities, the curriculum asks students to become producers of biological knowledge rather than passive consumers.

The researchers describe this work as gatebreaking, the intentional disruption of oppressive systems that prevent Black students from fully accessing STEM as their whole, authentic selves. Culturally relevant pedagogy, first articulated by Gloria Ladson-Billings in 1995, provides part of the foundation through its three pillars of academic excellence, cultural competence, and critical consciousness, but the authors argue that Afrofuturism extends the framework by adding speculative imagination and non-Western conceptions of time. Symbolized by the Sankofa bird, which looks back to move forward, Afrofuturism oscillates between ancestral histories and future possibilities, allowing students to critique the present while authoring themselves into futures that might otherwise seem unimaginable.

The study’s backdrop adds a note of urgency. In 2025, new United States federal guidelines began characterizing human-centered research promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion as a violation of anti-discrimination laws, and the National Science Foundation canceled the REC Network’s grant amid the immediate termination of more than one billion dollars in grant funds nationwide. The authors argue that the political climate is both the documented reason their funding was cut and the clearest justification for their curriculum, since rescinding such funds does not increase scientific rigor but distorts the integrity of STEM disciplines by ignoring whose knowledge and futures they have historically served. They call for future research tracking how Black undergraduates who experience Afrofuturist biology lessons develop long-term scientific identities, professional pathways, and community advocacy, and they contend that the gatebreaking strategies are transferable across STEM disciplines. For a network whose members see themselves as scholars, activists, and dreamers, the message is simple: Black students deserve to learn biology with their histories in mind and to use their imaginations freely to solve the problems facing their communities.

Subject of Research: Afrofuturist curriculum redesign to support Black students in undergraduate biology education

Article Title: Reclaiming legacy and envisioning futures in STEM education: Afrofuturism and a scholar-activist-community coalition

Article References: Williams, M. R., Stewart, I. M., Rouse, A. L., Seay, J., Petit, L. J., Woolfolk, M., Flagg, D. L., Jordan, K., Stewart, I., & Morton, T. R. (2026). Reclaiming legacy and envisioning futures in STEM education: Afrofuturism and a scholar-activist-community coalition. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1907915. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1907915

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1907915

Keywords: Afrofuturism, STEM education, biology curriculum, Black students, culturally relevant pedagogy, gatebreaking, Henrietta Lacks, health equity, higher education, qualitative case study, environmental racism, funding cuts