Chemistry for Everyone
An Interview with Alex H. Johnstone† Liberato Cardellini Dipartimento di Scienze dei Materiali e della Terra, Via Brecce Bianche, 60131 Ancona, Italy;
[email protected] The Interview How would you describe your early education? Did it influence your choice of career in science, or was that a result of parental, social, or other influences? I was brought up in the town of Leith, the seaport for Edinburgh in Scotland. My family was largely nonprofessional, but my grandmother had been a teacher and she encouraged me to love books. One of my brothers went to Chicago to study and become a Baptist minister in Illinois. My high school education began during World War II and so most of my teachers were women or men brought out of retirement because the younger men and women were in the services. They were, on the whole, an inspiring group of dedicated people who fired my love of learning; so much so that when I came to the end of high school, I had a problem. A decision had to be made about my university education: was it to study English, Medicine, Science, Mathematics, or Divinity? I was a budding polymath! At that time, the most difficult area of study to enter was Science, and so this brash youngster decided to attempt it. I entered the Faculty of Science in the University of Edinburgh to read Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry and eventually specialized in Chemistry with some Biology. All my other interests were maintained as “hobbies”. After this, I did teacher training at Moray House College, a strong school of psychometric psychology. I was hooked on chemistry and psychology, a dual interest which has been with me during my whole career. This was reinforced by a spell in the army when I served in a unit concerned with the psychology of leadership. After this I took up High School chemistry teaching for 13 years, where I was heavily involved in curriculum design and in assessment of chemistry at a National level. All of this was happening at ChemStudy time in the 1960s. Internationally something went wrong with chemistry teaching, and students voted (and still do) with their feet to avoid chemistry. Scotland, however, went against this trend, and numbers of chemistry students in high schools and universities steadily increased! Maybe we got it right! When you went into graduate work, did you seek some particular person to work with? Who was your advisor and why did you choose him? What was the most important thing you learned from your advisor? Towards the end of my high school teaching I was invited to take up a research fellowship at the University of Glasgow to pursue my interests in inorganic chemistry and education. Prof. David Sharp, the Ramsay Chair of Inorganic Chemistry, became my supervisor along with Prof. Stanley Nisbet of the Department of Education, and my Ph.D. eventually was presented in Chemical Education rather than in †
Former Professor of Chemistry, former Director of Teaching and Learning Service, Emeritus Professor of Science Education, Director and now Associate Director of the Centre for Science Education in the University of Glasgow, UK.
pure Chemistry. On the way through, I did intensive study in psychology to end up with “two legs”: one firmly in bioinorganic chemistry and the other in education. This put me in an almost unique position among chemists. I was a chemist who could speak to educationists on equal terms and an educational psychologist who could speak to chemists. From this there rapidly was formed a research group of chemists wanting to know more about education, and from it emerged a Centre for Science Education embracing all the disciplines within the Faculty of Science of the University of Glasgow. I continued to teach chemistry at all levels, but my research moved into the field of Science Education. This has resulted in about 200 publications and over 70 Ph.D.’s in the field. With this many students and publications and your many visitors, one might easily imagine you to work from dawn to dusk. Do you have any other interests? In answer to your first question I suggested that I am really a modest polymath. My interests are very wide, and my main recreation is hill hiking. While I am climbing, I find interest in botany, geology, bird life, and archaeology of the region. I am very interested in archaeology, and the area where I live is rich in at least 10,000 years of it! I love the visual arts and music (especially I enjoy singing), and I contribute to the church as a lay preacher. Your work has been recognized by the presentation of five prestigious international awards. What do you consider your most important accomplishment? What accomplishment are you most proud of? International honors (1, 2) are very welcome and leave a warm glow, but the sheer joy of seeing young undergraduate and graduate students catching my enthusiasm is the most rewarding thing of all. Editor’s Note: Impact Interviews This interview of Alex Johnstone by Liberato Cardellini follows the lead of the Impact series published in JCE during the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning with an interview of Erich Hückel in January 1972, the Impact series included Melvin Calvin, Harold Urey, Glenn Seaborg, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Linus Pauling and nearly 25 other chemists. The last Impact article, an interview of F. A. Cotton, appeared in 1986. The Impact series of interviews was organized by Robert C. Brasted. With the aid of interviewers Peter Farago, George B. Kauffman, Vincent J. Landis, J. E. Mulvaney, Norman H. Nachtrieb, Robert A. Plane, David Ridgway, and C. Allan Stahl, Brasted collected and published the insights and opinions of a cross section of chemists regarding chemical research, chemical education, and life in general. The Impact series still makes fascinating reading for anyone considering or involved in a scientific career. We hope that the picture of Alex Johnstone’s scientific life that arises out of the Cardellini interview will have significant impact on those considering chemical education as a life’s work, as well as those already involved in it. —JWM
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Chemistry for Everyone
If tomorrow you woke up and found you were 21 years old again, would you still follow a career in education? Why or why not? What still fascinates you about the field? What frustrates you? Many years ago I had a period of soul searching about whether I was using my chemistry degree well. I was spending a lot of time on education and little on pushing back the frontiers of chemistry. And then I realized that in making hundreds or even thousands of young people enthusiastic for chemistry, they would do far more for chemistry than I would do single handed. Yes, I would go back into teaching. You are the author of the “Ten Educational Commandments” [see below]. To what extent do those commandments transfer from research to the educational system? Ten Educational Commandments 1. What is learned is controlled by what you already know and understand. 2. How you learn is controlled by how you learned in the past (related to learning style but also to your interpretation of the “rules”). 3. If learning is to be meaningful, it has to link on to existing knowledge and skills, enriching both (3). 4. The amount of material to be processed in unit time is limited (4). 5. Feedback and reassurance are necessary for comfortable learning, and assessment should be humane. 6. Cognisance should be taken of learning styles and motivation. 7. Students should consolidate their learning by asking themselves about what goes on in their own heads— metacognition. 8. There should be room for problem solving in its fullest sense (5). 9. There should be room to create, defend, try out, hypothesise. 10. There should be opportunity given to teach (you don’t really learn until you teach) (6).
I do not claim any originality for these ten statements. One of my graduate students called them the Ten Commandments, but they are really distillations of well-known ideas from many sources. All have been built into my own research and development work over the years, and I have used them as “stars to steer by”. It would be foolish to claim that these have been transformed completely into practice, but there is evidence for the transfer of numbers 1–3 in reported work on prelabs, and number 8 is receiving a great deal of attention now. Could you describe how you think assessment should be carried out? Have your thoughts on this part of our educational commitment changed over the years, and why? Assessment is an area which I believe is treated very simplistically (7 ). It is clearly lagging behind the many developments in curriculum and, to some extent, holding them back. This is particularly evident in the area of problembased learning, where “commandment” 8 is being used and then assessed by multiple-choice questions. One is the antithesis of the other! The ACS is to be congratulated on its efforts to explore assessment more fully. May I take this opportunity to mention that I am writing a book at present on assessment? 1572
Professor Johnstone, you have written a General Chemistry book that has sold over a million copies. What is your secret? What were the major differences between this general chemistry book and others on the market? Why did your innovations work when so many others failed? What are the pitfalls in trying to integrate the results of research into a curriculum? Too many textbooks are models of “logical thought”, but few take any account of the psychological factors in learning, in concept formation, in interrelationships. If we had any success, it could have been that we took a psychological approach while staying true to the substance of chemistry (8). We were also lucky to publish at a time when the curriculum had not been set in concrete. Teachers were open to ideas. Now there is a real pressure for textbook writers to conform to the set concrete pattern of the “accepted” curriculum. Woe betide anyone who is too adventurous. His sales are doomed. Researchers in chemical education complain that their work does not receive the respect that it deserves, but others insist that little of consequence is done in the field; when useful knowledge is produced, respect will follow. How do you assess the situation? I believe that this is changing, at least in the UK. Government evaluation of universities now rests on two pillars, research and teaching. University departments which are deficient in these two have funding withheld or they are even closed down. It is now obligatory that all new university teachers must undergo training in teaching, and existing teachers are being urged to take this training voluntarily. There are dark hints that those who choose not to do so, will suffer at the promotion stages! In some of our top universities it is possible to become an associate professor on the basis of a teaching record. It seems only logical that if we are to be professional chemistry teachers, we must be professional both as chemists and as teachers. You have been Director of the Centre for Science Education at the University of Glasgow. How would you evaluate the transfer of the new knowledge generated at the Centre to the University? The best evidence that things are happening occurred in early 1994 when I was invited by the Principal of the University of Glasgow to set up a Teaching and Learning Service to serve all departments in the university. He had been observing our research, grounded in practice, and had heard of our work through the Faculty of Science. He decided that I had enough seniority and reputation to “sell” educational, innovative ideas to colleagues across the campus. I gathered eight good teachers from various disciplines and set up a service to fulfill two main purposes. First, we were to train the new university teachers, as I mentioned in my reply to your previous question. This was training in educational theory firmly based on research findings and practical pedagogics. Our second task was to nurture and support educational innovation in all departments by offering advice, expertise, and cross-fertilization between departments. I recall a fairly typical day when I began by visiting the Music Department to learn how they ran tutorials by email; then I went to Physics to discuss a problem they were having about transferable skills. This was followed by a visit to the Divinity Faculty to sit in on a lecture being presented by a staff member who was receiving adverse comments from his students and to offer help based on our research. The afternoon ended with a meeting with all the professorial staff of the Faculty of Law to discuss modern methods of assessment. This was recognition in a very practical way.
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 77 No. 12 December 2000 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
Chemistry for Everyone
In the USA difficulties in obtaining financial support for graduate students often limit research programs. How do you avoid the problem? This is a vexing question, and yet I have seldom had trouble in finding support. My research group of 14 at the moment contains only two secondary teachers who tend to be selfsupporting and work part time. The majority of my students either are supported by industrial grants or are overseas students supported by their governments or their home universities or by the British Council, which is a UK government body which gives educational and cultural aid to overseas countries. The chemical industry is well aware that its seed corn for its future employees is grown and nurtured in schools and universities, and they are keen to assure a steady flow of good young chemists. In Britain they are even putting money into research in primary schools to encourage even the youngest! The important thing is to have a large group so that they can feed off each other and create a “critical mass” from which new ideas come. This large group then attracts funding as its reputation grows. I began with one student, but this rose to four within a year and has, over 25 years, seldom fallen below ten. There seem to be few places where systematic research in education takes place. Should there be more? If so, what resources are required to have a successful center, and how can a young chemical educator acquire the necessary resources in a competitive environment? Is chemistry education better served by concentrating research in a few centers, or should every university conduct research in chemical education? I believe that there is a limit to the number of big centers, but I am convinced that the important thing is for the researchers to be teachers too. It is fatal if a researcher or a group becomes detached from the very disciplines they are trying to serve. Credibility as a chemist is an essential part of credibility as a chemical education researcher. Most universities could do with a chemical education specialist on the academic staff; someone who can “talk the language” of both chemists and educationists and act as a bridge between them. Chemists know how to teach a body of knowledge, but this information is worthless without a cognitive system that uses it. Could you explain why having a cognitive framework is more important than a body of information? How does one teach a cognitive framework? I am not sure that I agree with the beginning of your question. Many chemists may know the chemistry but may not know how to teach it. There is an arrogance abroad which imagines that teaching is an osmotic process by which wisdom from the teacher is transmitted to the head of the learners intact. If this does not take place, the learner is stupid or idle or both! The biggest lesson we all have to learn is that knowledge is constructed idiosyncratically by each student from what the teacher says or what the student thinks he or she is saying. The learning takes place against a background of previous knowledge, belief, and bias. And so we have come full circle back to the Ten Commandments. We ignore them at our peril and to the detriment of our students. I am old enough to recognize that some of the things I was taught as an undergraduate are no longer accepted by the chemical community.
So much of what we call “facts” may be transient and may only be a step towards deeper understanding. Do you not blush each time you try to teach bonding, knowing how much half-truth (if truth there be) we are “selling”? Much has to be untaught later; but unteaching is much harder than teaching. What I have come to realize is that “facts” may be impermanent, but the ways of thinking about knowledge and gathering knowledge have a much longer lifetime. Chemistry is one of the disciplines where we and our students learn to address questions to inanimate material and get answers which can make sense. Chemistry is really a way of asking questions, a way unique to the sciences, which enables us to penetrate a whole area of knowledge to share with our students. To convey the idea that the “facts” of chemistry are immutable is doing our students a disservice. What they need is a set of intellectual tools to enable them to continue the search. Conclusion In answering the last question, you commented that “Chemistry is really a way of asking questions, a way unique to the sciences, which enables us to penetrate a whole area of knowledge to share with our students.” It occurs to me that your research in chemistry education has involved a way of asking questions that is also unique. Your background in psychology and in chemistry has provided a set of intellectual tools that, combined with your unique intellectual gifts, have added immensely to understanding in the field. On behalf of the chemistry education community, I wish to thank you for sharing your insights and for your many years of service to chemistry education research. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Otto T. Benfey of Guilford College, Greensboro, NC; Diane M. Bunce of the Catholic University, Washington, DC; J. Dudley Herron of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, NC; Mary Virginia Orna of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia; and Peter Towse of the University of Leeds, England for their advice and the many suggestions they gave me for improving the questions for this interview. Literature Cited 1. Johnstone, A. H. Chem. Soc. Rev. 1980, 9, 365–380. 2. Johnstone, A. H. J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 262–268. 3. Johnstone, A. H. Chemical Education Research and Practice in Europe (CERAPIE) 2000, 1, 9–15; online at http://www.uoi. gr/conf_sem/cerapie/ (accessed Aug 2000). 4. Johnstone, A. H. J. Chem. Educ. 1993, 70, 701–705. 5. Johnstone, A. H. In Creative Problem Solving in Chemistry; Wood, C. A., Ed.; Royal Society of Chemistry: London, 1993. 6. Sirhan, G.; Gray, C.; Johnstone, A. H.; Reid, N. Univ. Chem. Educ. 1999, 3, 43–46. 7. Bahar, M.; Johnstone, A. H.; Hansell, M. H. J. Biol. Educ. 2000, 34, 87–89. 8. Johnstone, A. H.; Morrison, T. I.; Reid, N. Chemistry About Us; Heinemann: London, 1988.
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