Foreword

Like many instructors, we hoped to provide students with an inexpensive way of learning about subject matter and aligning their views of course content with application. In our context, the applications are both the lab component of the course and a service-learning project. With hopes of meeting these goals, here, we adapt Austin Lim’s Open Neuroscience Initiative, a work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Some further goals within the adaptation of Lim’s OER are to supplement the existing content with freely available videos and other resources; to include instructional aids, namely slideshows for instructors who choose to use the adapted OER; and to develop an associated lab manual.

Instructors who would like to have editable versions of the slideshows provided are welcomed to contact the authors, Erin Mazerolle (emazerol@stfx.ca) or Sherry Neville-MacLean (sneville@stfx.ca). We will try to provide links to downloadable slideshows that can be edited for your purposes. If you use our resources, we ask that you acknowledge our work, as well as Dr. Lim’s work, and the Creative Commons license.

A note on our approach

Marginalization is not limited to overt discrimination and outright bigotry. Rather, it often operates through interconnected systems of oppression that perpetuate inequity across social, political and institutional contexts. Neuroscience and psychology are no exception to this rule. While blatant forms of exclusion persist, discrimination frequently manifests in more subtle but equally consequential ways, particularly within research and academia. These inequities are reflected in research practices that exclude or underrepresent marginalized populations, the disproportionate focus on topics that benefit dominant groups, assumptions that White, heteronormative male experiences represent the human experiences, and barriers that limit who can conduct and disseminate research.  In academia, this can look like BIPOC students experiencing academic opportunity gaps and problematic identity fragmentation (Cruz et al., 2023). Women make up three quarters of psychology students, and yet less than one third of psychology professors. Female psychologists are published less, cited less, and have more coauthors (Odic and Wojcik, 2019). In this same study, Odik and Wojcik (2019) found that for every publication a female author has within the field of psychology, a male author has 46% more. In an analysis of almost 3200 neuroscience and psychiatry papers, just over half of them included studies consisting of more than just the male sex, and of that, only 17% had an equal ratio of male to female cases. Only 5% of the examined studies used best practices for discovering differences between the sexes (Rechlin et al., 2022). The implications of this are profound. Marginalized people are more likely to experience misdiagnosis and delayed treatment because so many diagnostic models have an androcentric basis. Conditions that primarily impact marginalized communities under researched and underfunded (Merone et al., 2022) . Because marginalized people are less likely to complete research and have their research published, there’s a loss of innovation and perspective. This lack of representation can cause a perpetuation of bias by discouraging marginalized people from entering primarily White male dominated fields (Llorens et al., 2022). Taken together, this evidence demonstrates that meaningful efforts toward equity and inclusion remain essential within neuroscience and psychology. However, recognizing these inequities is only the first step. An equally important question concerns how these issues should be addressed in ways that are both effective and broadly accepted.  It is our aim to increase equity in neuroscience education through structurally inclusive materials and approaches.

Although strategies to increase values of diversity and equity have been developed, their effectiveness has been mixed. In some cases, equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives are not only met with resistance, but end up backfiring completely, and interventions meant to help close the political divide are increasing it instead. A scoping review conducted by Müller et al. (2026) on interventions aimed to address social polarization in a school context revealed that didactic approaches more often led to negative results, or had no impact at all, in comparison to other forms of intervention . One explanation is that didactic approaches can be perceived as moralizing, which can evoke defensiveness of guilt, leading to backlash rather than reflection. However, strategies that encourage empathy and critical thinking tend to be more constructive. Essentially, worries about reverse prejudice and resistance to EDI principles slowing progress that we need to be making. We feel that strategies being employed now to increase EDI values may not be resonating with those who need to hear them the most.

Resistance to EDI initiative has also been examined through the lens of perceived threat. Iyer (2022) identifies three types of threats that may contribute to advantaged groups’ opposition to EDI policies. The first of these threats, known as resource threat, is concern about losing access to outcomes and opportunities. This is seen through narratives accusing EDI values of promoting ‘reverse prejudice’, as opposed to creating an equitable system. The next form of threat identified by Iyers is symbolic threat, which is the concern about the introduction of new values, cultures and expectations. The final reason for resistance discussed by Iyers is ingroup morality threat, which can be understood as concern about the advantaged group’s role in perpetuating inequality. In addition to identifying these forms of perceived threats, Iyers provided a few strategies for how to tackle this resistance. Some such strategies include emphasizing principles of justice and merit, highlighting the inclusion of all groups, and framing responsibility in terms of positive collective action and growth rather than a moral failing.

In light of this research, this textbook takes a somewhat different approach. Rather than positioning diversity and inclusion as separate or supplementary topics, we aim to integrate them into the foundation of how neuroscience is presented. Our goal is to create the kind of textbook that might exist in a more equitable context – one in which diverse perspectives are represented as the default, instead of an explicit correction. Our aim is to embed inclusivity in examples, language, research representation, and subject matter, without explicitly stating that it is an objective.  By grounding students’ early exposure to neuroscience in this way, we hope to normalize diversity as an inherent part of the field, rather than an additional consideration. Our pedagogical approach is aligned with the framework of critical inclusion, which emphasizes the dynamic, varying and intersectional components of learner identities as an asset, and conceptualizes this form of pedagogy as “that which engages all students in relevant, responsive and rigorous learning” (Cruz et al., 2023).This approach is intended to reduce defensiveness, avoid “othering”, and foster a learning environment in which multiple perspectives, healthy discourse, and critical thinking are perceived as expected and valuable.

This approach, related to structural inclusion strategies, is not intended to dismiss or minimize the very real and harmful impacts of inequity and inequality, nor is it to avoid engaging with them. Rather, it is a pedagogical choice which reflects an effort to address how inclusive education is often perceived, and our attempt to help close the divide. By embedding these values directly into the structure of the material, we aim to make it more accessible, particularly to those who may be less receptive to more explicit approaches.

References

Cruz, R. A., Firestone, A. R., & Love, M. (2024). Beyond a seat at the table: Imagining educational equity through critical inclusion.Educational Review, 76(1), 69–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2023.2173726
Iyer, A. (2022). Understanding advantaged groups’ opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies: The role of perceived threat. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 16(5), e12666. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12666
Llorens, A., Tzovara, A., Bellier, L., Bhaya-Grossman, I., Bidet-Caulet, A., Chang, W. K., Cross, Z. R., Dominguez-Faus, R., Flinker, A., Fonken, Y., Gorenstein, M. A., Holdgraf, C., Hoy, C. W., Ivanova, M. V., Jimenez, R. T., Jun, S., Kam, J. WY., Kidd, C., Marcelle, E., … Dronkers, N. F. (2021). Gender bias in academia: A lifetime problem that needs solutions. Neuron, 109(13), 2047–2074. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.06.002
Merone, L., Tsey, K., Russell, D., & Nagle, C. (2022). Sex Inequalities in Medical Research: A Systematic Scoping Review of the Literature. Women’s Health Reports, 3(1), 49–59. https://doi.org/10.1089/whr.2021.0083
Müller, M. Y., Santavicca, T., Miconi, D., & Rousseau, C. (2026). Interventions Addressing Current Social Polarization in the School Context: A Scoping Review. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 46(1), 111–146. https://doi.org/10.1177/02724316251352126
Odic, D., & Wojcik, E. H. (2020). The publication gender gap in psychology. American Psychologist, 75(1), 92–103. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000480
Rechlin, R. K., Splinter, T. F. L., Hodges, T. E., Albert, A. Y., & Galea, L. A. M. (2022). An analysis of neuroscience and psychiatry papers published from 2009 and 2019 outlines opportunities for increasing discovery of sex differences. Nature Communications, 13(1), 2137. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29903-3