Towards an Education Through and For Social Justice: Humanizing a Life Sciences Curriculum Through Co-Creation, Critical Thinking and Anti-Racist Pedagogy

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a strong paper on an important topic for scholars and practitioners interested in socially just education and student-staff partnerships. The "through and for" framing is helpful. The study is methodologically sound, presented clearly (with one exception - see below), and the implications are significant. Well done.

I have two suggestions for improvements to this paper:

1. As a reader, I would like to know more about the students in the sample/study. The paper describes the context of this institution in depth, but does not provide meaningful description of student identities in the study. Also, the results are presented as a whole for students (e.g., n=19, or ...). Did aspects of student identity ever arise in these results? For example, are there shared identity characteristics among the students who have a "neutral" response about the extent to which assessments facilitated discussion about racism outside the module? (p. 9).

2. The work described in this paper is resonant with the Being Human in STEM initiative. I believe explicit references to that work would bolster the claims and findings in this paper. The Being Human in STEM paper on the overall project's student-staff partnerships and the paper on student-staff partnerships in chemical education, and the book Being Human in STEM might be particularly helpful. I am not suggesting that the paper under review needs to be radically revised to engaged with Being Human -- instead, I see the two as similar enough that they reinforce each other.

Author Response

1. We thank Reviewer 1 for this comment and agree further data on student identity would add important context and allow us to examine shared identity aspects. In this pilot project we did not collect further data on this aspect but intend to do so in our future work.
2. We thank Reviewer 1 for directing us to the important and interesting Human in STEM initiative and have referenced it across lines 475-477.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I attached my comments and suggestions that are embedded in the review draft for the author(s) to read.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Reviewer 2’s comments embedded in the paper:

Line 93 – We agree that students should be encouraged to do this, and we explain further in the methodology and discussion sections that our students also use critical thinking to challenge the disciplines processes and scientific method. The examination of health inequalities is another way to do this for the students in the School of Life Sciences.

Line 95 – Thank you for this comment, we have adjusted the statement accordingly in the revised manuscript lines 96-97.

Line 266 – Thank you for this comment, this is addressed in lines 315-319.

Line 351  - We describe this as a ‘critical thinking tool kit’ because it contains 5 different ‘tools’ (described in lines 170-172) that facilitate critical thinking.

Line 371 – Reviewer 2 refers to Question 2 in their comment -  ‘the effectiveness of the case study in facilitating the understanding of racial health gaps.’ We believe we have addressed this in the results section with table 2 and lines 361-373. We discuss these findings across lines 495-514 and then discuss more broadly the challenges of facilitating understanding of racism across lines 540-567.

Line 483 – Thank you for this comment, we have added this point more explicitly to the results section in lines 362-363.

Line 530 – thank you for this comment, we have adjusted the statement accordingly (line 543-545).

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I thought this was article was well-structured, coherent, and relevant - especially for teacher educators and researchers. I appreciated the author clarifying the distinction between education "for" and "through" social justice and thought it made for compelling reading. The Discussion session was especially robust and presented a richly complex presentation of the research outcomes gleaned from the study. In my view, this article makes a strong contribution to the literature in the field.

Author Response

We thank Reviewer 3 for the comments.