Science class as clinic: Why histories of segregated instruction matter for health equity reforms today

Abstract

Research has recommended centering health disparities to make science instruction relevant to students from minoritized racial and ethnic groups. While promoted as a recent innovation, the repurposing of science instruction to improve the health of demographic groups has a longer history traceable to segregated and colonial schooling. Using a historicizing approach, this study explores how certain U.S. science classrooms have become clinics of preventative care aimed at transforming groups into healthy citizens. Analysis identifies how U.S. science education studies have used psychological, sociological, and anthropological lenses to divide students into populations, classifying some as needing intervention to improve their minds (e.g., basic health knowledge), home lives (e.g., daily habits), and cultural beliefs (e.g., attitudes toward science and medicine). Through systematic analysis of U.S. science education journals and sources cited therein, I map shifts over three periods: the rise of urban, segregated, and colonial schooling (1901–45), postwar desegregation and international development (1946–89), and equity reforms (1990–2021). Despite declines in deficit language, analysis suggests the intervention space of the science-class-as-clinic still demarcates groups as not yet fully reasoning, self-regulating, or agentic, and as needing the applied relevance of preventative health. Paradoxically, efforts to redress disparities may reinsert older distinctions by positing groups as educationally and medically at-risk—implicitly locating inequities within students rather than the unjust systemic conditions they face. I conclude with implications for research and practice, highlighting approaches that do not treat educational and health inequities as problems to be fixed in the child, family, or community.