UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A new genetics and genealogy curriculum co-developed by Nina Jablonski, Evan Pugh University Professor of Anthropology and director of the Center for Human Evolution and Diversity in the College of the Liberal Arts, will be featured on PBS' "Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr." on April 9.
The show features a collaboration between Gates, an Emmy award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist and cultural critic, and Nina Jablonski, Evan Pugh University Professor of Anthropology and director of the Center for Human Evolution and Diversity in the College of the Liberal Arts. The duo developed the “Finding Your Roots Genetics and Genealogy Curriculum.”
Jablonski said she and Gates, who worked with a group of historians, artists, biologists, geneticists, anthropologists, genealogists and educators, were looking for an educational model that would excite young people to find their roots by studying their own DNA and family history.
“The curriculum is all about getting kids to think about themselves as first-person active participants, as scientists, as discoverers of themselves,” she said. “If we succeed in that, we will have created some scientists and some wonderfully educated citizens.”