Context in Chemistry: Integrating Environmental Chemistry with the Chemistry Curriculum

Abstract

Environmental issues are topical not only in the news but in many chemistry courses, where they are used to connect the concerns of chemistry to concerns familiar to students. As such, environmental issues provide a context for understanding and learning chemical principles. However, in an environmental chemistry course for nonscience majors, we found that the mere presence of environmental topics in the curriculum was not enough to establish and reveal the connections between the students' environmental interests and chemical principles. For the environmental issues to function effectively as context, they had to be integrated into the curriculum in those places where students look for contextual information. This integration demanded restructuring the entire course to sustain the environmental focus, using principles derived from scientific rhetoric and communication. Although this course was designed explicitly for non-science majors, our experience in blending concern for communication with concern fo...