Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative...?

Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society, 2015

In order to improve the ability to apply knowledge of chemistry (acquired in the existing educational system) in real life, the model for consideration of ecological issues was developed and applied in high school. The model consists of a continuous text "It Happened, What's the Problem?" and a test with non-continuous text "A Guide Through the Problem", which were prepared for consideration of the problem of eutrophication. All results obtained (average achievement of 70.9±14.3 %) showed that the application of the model enabled: understanding of an ecological problem based on scientific representations of the term eutrophication given in the continuous text, realization that pollution of the environment may be directly related to modern life, application of acquired knowledge of chemistry to observe and understand the cause and effect of eutrophication in the environment, to draw a scientific conclusion, and understanding the importance of science and technology discoveries for solving ecological problems. In addition, the model contributed to the development of student's environmental literacy (ecological knowledge and cognitive skills), ability to think critically, and provided possibilities for classroom knowledge to become applicable in real life.

Science & Education, 2013

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and UNESCO have proposed that the International Year of Chemistry, 2011, should make a strong educational contribution to the goals of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. This emphasis is absolutely necessary because education for sustainability remains practically absent nowadays in many high school and university chemistry curricula all over the world. Behind this lack of attention to the current situation of planetary emergency, there are several obstacles that we analyse in this paper. We firstly discuss an extended conception of "pure Chemistry"-object of chemists' research and teaching-the object of which would just be to increase knowledge: moral problems should only appear in connection to the use of the applications of science by, generally, nonscientists. This belief that genuine scientific activity lies beyond the reach of moral judgment is logically transferred to teaching, voluntarily limited to the transmission of the corpus of knowledge. Consequently, the challenges of sustainable development, with so many social implications, are put aside. After questioning this and other obstacles, we develop the possible contribution of chemistry and chemical education to the construction of a sustainable future, in accordance with the goals of the International Year of Chemistry.

Journal of Chemical Education

Despite advances in active learning pedagogy and other methods designed to increase student engagement in the chemistry classroom, retention and engagement issues still persist, particularly with respect to women and minorities underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) programs. Relevancy also remains elusive in the chemistry classroom, where real-world issues of social justice, health, and the environment are largely missing from chemistry curricula. As a result, students struggle to understand their role as change agents and global citizens with leadership responsibility toward developing solutions to these justice issues, particularly as they relate to chemistry and manufacturing industries. Green chemistry curriculum developed by groups such as the Molecular Design Research Network, Beyond Benign, Greener Education Materials for Chemists, and others is available for faculty to seamlessly integrate topics of social, health, and environmental justice problem-solving into their classes, with a focus on educating future chemists who recognize their role in solving (or preventing) global justice issues. The purpose of this paper is to share new instructional strategies needed to add relevancy to the life of chemistry students.

Canadian Woman Studies, 1993

Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2011

Inclusive Education and lifelong living, 2023

This chapter describes an approach to introduce and teach the concepts of sustainability and humanitarianism as emerging paradigms in a teacher training institution within a discourse on other researchers’ views. The interest in teaching chemistry by focusing on concepts for sustainable development and humanitarianism stems from environmental concerns with plastic wastes, illegal logging, illegal mining, and land degradation, that the country of this researcher is faced with. As educators, we are interested in educating future generations so that they can cope with environmental challenges that their country and other nations face. The microscale approach could be one way out that most developing and emergent economies need to close the gap in acquiring scientific knowledge in an ecologically acceptable manner to save existing spheres and posterity.

School Science and Mathematics, 1983

Affective Ecocriticisms: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, 2018

“The task is not to shrink ourselves into a corner, to dissolve ourselves into ‘no impact,’ but rather to find another, new, even spectacular way […] to co-inhabit this world” (Weston, xiv). Told their whole lives to “leave no impact” on the planet, or worse, to “save the planet, kill yourself,” undergraduate Environmental Studies (ES) students today are seduced into a kind of green, self-erasing nihilism. During their baccalaureate studies, ES students go from being idealistic and optimistic to despairing and apathetic when they learn how unjust the world is, and how entrenched our environmental crises are. Their courses do not help them imagine recourse to their complicity in social and environmental injustices across the globe. They are certain that anything they could individually do would never be enough to address the vast scale of problems. And more, they become pessimistic about the ability of existing institutions and systems to act in anything but the interests of capitalist growth. ES students often leave college not the well-trained, problem-solving leaders that ES programs promise on their websites, but deflated, aimless, self-loathing, ashamed, angry, and apathetic. This chapter argues that greater attention to the affective experiences of ES students within ES curricula is crucial to developing the generation of environmental leaders so many programs claim to be training. But it is not only a matter of meeting our outcomes; it is an pedagogical concern: it is unethical to expect students to devote themselves to saving the planet, but then fail to prepare them affectively and psychically for this challenge, as if the intellectual projects of our syllabi and curriculum design are separate from students’ embodied lives. Those who study ES programs understand that a poorly-organized ES experience creates an “urgency + despair = apathy” scenario (Maniates), but less scholarship is devoted to articulating the alternatives, and even less acknowledges the centrality of students’ emotional responses to their coursework to generating or failing to generate the next generation of thinkers and leaders. I examine the affective experiences of undergraduate Environmental Studies (ES) majors, with the aim of offering insights about environmental affect for the development of undergraduate ES programs and curricula. ES syllabi often end with a hopeful turn, in order to avoid leaving students completely nihilistic and paralyzed by despair. But I want to offer a deeper critique of this classic “arc of hope” narrative. Building on Heather Houser’s critique of the positive affects of hope and optimism in Ecosickness, Sara Ahmed’s various critiques of happiness, and the growing literature on hope in the environmental movement (Solnit, McKibben, Weston, and Bristow et al, for example) and in critical pedagogy (hooks, Duncan-Andrade, Freire, Fiskio, and West, for example), I will argue that we undermine the potential of these future planet-savers by suggesting that hope alone will adequately prepare them for the turbulent waters ahead. This literature also insists that making material relevant to and respectful of students’ whole selves, not just their minds or desire to obtain employment upon graduating, is necessary for retaining underrepresented students. Thus, I also want to argue, ES curricula need to be more attentive to students’ affective lives if they want to not only attract underrepresented students, but to help them to thrive in college. To these ends, I will argue that ES curricula must trouble students’ assumptions about happiness, provide them tools to critically analyze the effects of environmental narratives on their energies, challenge their views of what “counts” as social change, and deconstruct their attachments to binaries like theory/action and objectivity/subjectivity, hard/soft skill, and problem-solving/academic. These skills are needed in order to avoid slipping into paralysis, for destabilizing existing power relations, and for creating the affective conditions for sustaining mind and body in the face of crisis. As the very “conversation around hope within environmental discourse is itself anguished,” leading to either naiveté or techno-optimism, as Houser argues (219), I suggest a variety of these more complex strategies, which achieve two goals I will explore in this essay: they acknowledge that ES syllabi and curricula are environmental narratives and should therefore be analyzed as a discourse of “ecosickness”, and, most importantly, they help “set into motion the messy emotions that can […] direct our energies toward planetary threats” and action (Houser, 223). When ES students graduate, as much as they need to know the details of environmental problems and the uneven benefits and burdens of their solutions, they need the affective disposition and the imaginations to intervene as engaged citizens.

Journal of Chemical Education, 2021

The purpose of this paper is to discuss ways that a chemistry course could reposition itself by adopting interdisciplinary approaches based on systems thinking and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as overarching frameworks, to give an overview of several challenges that chemistry in higher education is facing, and to discuss how those can be addressed as a result of this repositioning. We will be discussing the need for a new type of scientist, one who has a deep understanding of their own discipline but also an overview of the links with other disciplines and is equipped with skills that will help them contribute to the solutions of a very complex system: the human–environment interaction system. Chemists should be part of what is described by earth systems’ science as “the new social contract” between science and society. Finally, we will explore how this can be reflected in the curricula of higher education, and we will present a University of Bristol educational initiati...