Credit: Stephen McNeil

At the start of the course, students at the University of British Columbias Okanagan campus work collaboratively to identify how chemistry might help address the United Nations sustainable development goals.

At the University of British Columbias Okanagan campus, two chemistry teachers have used systems thinking to help them redesign their general chemistry curriculum around the United Nations sustainable development goals (UN SDGs).

The small campus and team have meant that W. Stephen McNeil and Tamara K. Freeman have had a lot of flexibility in their work, according to McNeil. Theyve been revising all aspects of the general chemistry curriculum since around 2013. That course is taken by between 750 and 800 first-year science students annually. In the past, the course has lacked context to explain the relevance of chemistry in the students everyday lives, McNeil says. So he and Freeman, who is the first-year coordinator at the Okanagan campus, decided to rebuild the curriculum from scratch. To help them do that, the pair turned to the UN SDGs: 17 topics that the UN has identified as important for building a sustainable world.

Were not the first people to realize this, McNeil says, but the United Nations sustainable development goals are a really rich thematic framework that we thought that we could make use of.

So thats where the pair started. Their aim, McNeil explains, was to get students to realize that chemistry is a human endeavor that can help solve the SDGs as well as be part of problems such as pollution and climate change. They recognized that just telling the students about chemistrys importance wouldnt be enough. We wanted to give our students opportunities to explore for themselves, McNeil says.

Credit: Stephen McNeil

Students at the University of British Columbias Okanagan campus work together on activities linking what they have learned to the United Nations sustainable development goals.

The two began by developing a vision of what the new course might be. Rather than try to do it all at once, we worked toward it incrementally, McNeil says. Using systems thinking, they slowly developed the curriculum by introducing small changes each year and then building upon them.

The work is a little like a retrosynthesis in organic chemistry, according to McNeil. The pair picked an SDG and then tried to find topics or themes that could be linked to that goal; they then chose chemical concepts applicable to those topics. For example, six SDGs are related to the topic of ozone and chlorofluorocarbons, and that can be linked to several chemical concepts.

This new approach has changed the content of the coursefor example, adding spectroscopy and other analytical ideas that McNeil says traditionally dont show up in a first-year curriculum but can provide evidence to the students.

We havent landed yet on a single operational definition of what systems thinking means or within the context of chemistry education what it should imply in terms of our practice.

W. Stephen McNeil, chemistry professor, University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus

Freeman and McNeil have also changed the delivery of the course to fit the SDG framework. After introducing different concepts, for example, the teachers give the students time to reflect and put the concepts into context. There are points in the course where we pause for a moment and say, OK, lets think about everything weve just been discussing for the last 46 weeks and talk about an issue, McNeil explains.

For example, students first learn about gas laws and kinetic molecular theory, introductory spectroscopy and Lewis structures, resonance, and the correlation of bond order with chemical bond strengths. Then the teaching pauses and McNeil or Freeman introduces a case study looking at the role of chlorofluorocarbons in refrigeration and the depletion of the ozone layer.

According to McNeil, these case studies were originally designed to add context to what the students were learning, but through surveys and interviews with students, they found that the students believe the activities also help reinforce learning.

While systems thinking strongly guided the development of the case study exercises and the SDG framework, Freeman and McNeil have not explicitly included the development of systems thinking skills as learning objectives for their course. However, they suspect some of those skills are developed by the students anyway.

And that ambiguity highlights what McNeil describes as a point of tension among chemistry educators. We havent landed yet on a single operational definition of what systems thinking means or within the context of chemistry education what it should imply in terms of our practice, he says. There is a diversity of approach and a diversity of interpretation.

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