Scoping the Future of Education in Chemistry

Abstract

New technologies are bringing open access to knowledge to an ever-expanding fraction of the world’s learners, while research is providing new understanding of how people learn at different ages and stages of their development. These twin forces are reshaping the nature of education in the 21 century and present a profound challenge to those concerned with education in chemistry. Continuing advances in the range of computer applications that can help to explain and illustrate chemistry principles, structures and phenomena; a myriad of internet sites offering course materials on chemistry-related topics; and new mobile phone applications under development promise to provide unrivalled opportunities to access information and visualize chemical structures and experiments in any location and even while on the move. While offering unprecedented opportunities for learners, these developments require comprehensive rethinking of the roles of the chemistry teacher, the classroom, and the laboratory. Nevertheless, one factor remains constant: teachers and learners require support materials to provide them with reliable, up-to-date knowledge, explanations, examples and illustrations. These challenges formed the background to a consultation co-convened in Namur 14-15 January 2014 by CHEMRAWN and the International Organization for Chemical Sciences in Development (IOCD), in which a dozen invited experts from around the world reviewed current developments in education in chemistry and considered some critical future needs and advised IOCD (an IUPAC affiliate) on its potential future role in the field. The meeting was opened by IOCD’s Executive Director, Alain Krief (Emeritus Professor in Organic Chemistry, University of Namur) and Leiv Sydnes (Past President of IUPAC and current chair of CHEMRAWN). It was noted that chemistry was often failing to gain an appropriate level of attention in educational curricula and was being neglected, for example, as a subject in web sciences. It was also felt to be important to see the role of chemistry education beyond the school, encouraging greater public understanding and more informed and balanced treatment of topics in the media. Beyond traditional classroom teaching, chemistry learning needed to be supported through informal approaches and through learning by doing, with the creative aspects of the subject being stressed. Stephen Matlin (Adjunct Professor, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London; Head of Strategic Development, IOCD) provided an introduction to IOCD; a perspective on global changes that set the scene for the discussions; and IOCD’s ambition for the outcomes of the meeting. Created at UNESCO in 1981 and registered as an NGO in Belgium, IOCD has a record over more than 30 years of supporting chemists in lowand middleincome countries (LMICs) in collaborative programs with high-income countries (HICs). IOCD’s work now focuses in three areas: chemistry for better health; chemistry for a better environment; and capacity building in chemistry education. Reflecting on the value of education in chemistry, Matlin observed that the substantial benefits from the chemical sciences in terms of wealth and health had been very unevenly distributed. Technical progress (a combination of technological advances and their diffusion and uptake in different countries and the capacities of the countries themselves to conduct and apply research) is a crucial factor globally. LMICs cannot do without homegrown capacity for scientific research and technological know-how: increasingly, a nation’s wealth will depend on the knowledge it accrues and how it applies it, rather than the resources it controls. The uneven distribution of general literacy and scientific literacy around the world remains a major challenge and science curricula need to be reinvented to harmonize with changes in the practice of science/ technology, an information age, and the quality of life. In the case of chemistry literacy, challenges include how to make good quality, relevant chemistry education available, accessible and affordable to all; how chemistry education must change, with regard to modes of teaching and learning and with regard to its relevance not only to the latest scientific knowledge and theories, but also to the wider world of work in general and to the need to support and enable social responsibility by all people; and the often neglected Conference Call Reports from recent conferences and symposia See also www.iupac.org/home/conferences.html