Chemistry of Literature, Literature of Chemistry - ACS Publications

Chapter 2

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Chemistry of Literature, Literature of Chemistry: Developing and Promoting a Course for the Humanities and Natural Sciences Dan Sykes*,1 and Mark S. Morrisson2 1Department

of Chemistry, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, United States 2Department of English, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, United States *E-mail: [email protected].

An inter-domain chemistry and literature course at Penn State is a pedagogically innovative course co-taught by Chemistry and English faculty. The course teaches both the basic concepts of chemistry and their cultural elaboration in literature across the modern period. Students discuss how texts such as Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, WWI poetry, and White Noise, among others, mirror the cultural perceptions of science during their respective time periods and provides students with a nuanced understanding of how literature and science inform each other and negotiate cultural, religious, and political tensions. A principal aim of the course is to facilitate mutual informed dialog concerning science and society between students from a diverse set of majors.

Calls for colleges and universities to emphasize “integrative learning” have increased in recent years and have been heard by universities including our own. As one influential appeal put it, students need “a high level of integrative learning and demonstrated accomplishment across the full range of essential learning outcomes (1).” That 2007 report by the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education & America’s Promise noted that students themselves were already moving in this direction by choosing double majors or minors that crossed the

© 2017 American Chemical Society Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


“‘liberal arts/professional’ divide.” But the report lamented that “many of the most imaginative efforts to forge new connections between the liberal arts and sciences and professional studies still hover on the margins,” and concluded: “Higher education needs new leadership and new determination to move these promising developments from the margins to the center.” Since the report, the call for general education curricula to foster integration of knowledge across domains and fields has only increased (2, 3), and we shall discuss our own university’s recent efforts to formalize this mandate in its curriculum. But, in 2005, there was no such general education mandate, and we approached with excitement but also some trepidation our experiment in cross-departmental---indeed cross-college---cooperation. Deeply invested in a vision of undergraduate education that cultivates deep knowledge and critical thinking skills in a major but also the ability to integrate domains of knowledge and thought that are all too often taught in isolation, we sat down together to design an experimental course that would model the kind of cross-disciplinary integrative thinking we hoped to see in all Penn State undergraduates. The challenge was to imagine a course that would be sustainable and make an impact within the constraints of a large land grant university with a complicated set of curricular mandates and scheduling challenges. The cross-listed course, Chem/Engl 233, “Chemistry and Literature,” was approved by our Faculty Senate Curricular Affairs process in Spring 2006 and has been offered as a team-taught course every year since 2007. The course has served as a model in the recent discussions at Penn State about a new university requirement for general education courses that integrate two or more knowledge domains. The most important thing that we had to determine---and that anyone proposing such a course at another university or college should clearly establish---was a compelling rationale for the course. What did our students need to learn from this course that would justify the considerable commitment of resources necessitated by a team-taught course? We found that we shared a concern about poor scientific literacy in contemporary America and about the risks a narrow specialization of knowledge posed to a democratic capitalist society. Above all, though, we were concerned about the dangers both to society and to science itself of a citizenry all too willing to see science as a separate sphere of knowledge, unrelated to the broader culture, society, and economy, immune to the manipulations of political and corporate agendas, and, worst of all, without ethical or social implications. We concluded that our course would aim to help students become thoughtful and critical participants in public debates about science and help motivate an appreciation for science as a major component of our contemporary society. To gain this perspective, several approaches were considered. For example, the course could focus on current scientific developments, such as nanotechnology, and its influence on film, literature (e.g., cyberpunk), and pop culture or the course could emphasize heated political topics such as climate change and incorporate nonfictional works from mainstream pundits. Instead, we decided students would need to understand the workings of science in culture and society through a historical perspective that would provide them a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the present, and they would need to acquire from the 12 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

course a current understanding of the chemistry involved in the areas the course covered. In short, the course needed to be a humanities course and a natural science course---in the modern university terms of academic departments---and it would need to do the hard work of aggressively keeping methods, concerns, and approaches of both disciplines in dialogue with each other throughout the semester, and of fostering a classroom environment in which students from multiple disciplinary backgrounds would learn from each other’s questions and concerns.


“One Culture”: Science and Literature in the General Education Curriculum Teaching the history of science solely in terms of the history of crucial “discoveries” of the “Great Scientists” tends to cordon science off from the rest of social and cultural history and lends to the perception of science’s detachment and isolation in the present that we most hoped to challenge. So, theories that contested that old historiography of science would necessarily inform our pedagogy. For example, though it still focuses more on seemingly internal institutional dynamics in science than our course would, we would use Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts for its challenge to the Great Scientist historiography, for its compelling description of academic science in terms of a “normal science” that in itself ceaselessly, if slowly, produces the conditions for its own eventual failure and renewal through paradigm shifts, and, finally, because Kuhn’s acknowledgment that the perspective of a scientist is formed in part by broad cultural and social forces opens the door to our class to explore a wider range of those forces than Kuhn himself did in his tour-de-force 1962 volume, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (4). And Kuhn’s groundbreaking volume represented just one of many possible approaches to the cross-disciplinary exploration we wished to model for our students. Before setting out to design the first syllabus for our hybrid humanities/natural sciences course, we looked for inspiration from scholars who had long been working at the nexus of the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences that is often the focus of fields known variously as Literature and Science, Science Studies, or Science, Technology, and Society (STS), and in current research in the History or Philosophy of Science. Often housed in humanities or social science departments in many universities, and in dialogue with the science and engineering departments, almost all of these scholars challenge the conception that science can be clearly demarcated from other realms of modern culture, a conception often found in our culture at large but also in many undergraduate courses in science and the history of science. We might essentially see these perspectives and methodologies as pushing against, in various ways, the famous “Two Cultures” thesis of C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University that was expanded and published as a book that the Times Literary Supplement in 1995 and again in 2008 listed as one of the most influential books since the Second World War. In The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Snow argued that, “the intellectual life of the whole 13 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups.,” resulting in a society with “Literary intellectuals at one pole---at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension---sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding (5).” Snow’s talk and his book prompted a blistering response from literary critic F. R. Leavis and a public debate (6). As Helen Small has documented (7), these “two cultures” disputes have been around since antiquity, but modern examples include the science and literature debates between T. H. Huxley and Mathew Arnold in the 1880s, the Snow/Leavis debate, and the “Sokal affair” of 1996, in which physicist Alan Sokal attempted to discredit cultural studies and science studies in the humanities by placing a hoax article on the social construction of gravity in a prominent academic journal, Social Text (8). But Small argues that these debates tend to reveal more about the “wider social, cultural, institutional, and political factors that had a bearing on the argument,” than they do about the actual academic research in the disciplines that are commonly oversimplified by the debates. Our humanities and science course would be well positioned to explore such a perspective on public debates about science in modern life. To cultivate in our students the integrative thinking and critical perspective afforded by cross-disciplinary scholarship, we turned to what Small calls a “one culture” model that, as she puts it, “consciously rejects the imprisoning power of specialization and seeks to establish the depth of cultural overlap and productive interaction between different spheres of knowledge.” But, while advocating an interdisciplinary approach, it would be folly to underestimate the power and institutional dynamics of specialization in the modern university as well as in the sciences. Indeed, Small emphasizes the deep entrenchment of disciplinarity in the modern university, where even cross-disciplinary collaborations, such as those in the history of science and science studies, and interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching are often sustained by discipline-specific training. And, while universities have been calling for increasing interdisciplinarity over the past decade as if it were a new imperative, Andrew Abbott argues that “the emphasis on interdisciplinarity emerged contemporaneously with, not after, the disciplines. . . . There was no long process of ossification; the one bred the other almost immediately (9).” For example, he notes that by the mid-1920s several private foundations were already focused on eliminating barriers between the social science disciplines. Research practices are highly specialized even within specific science disciplines. The explosive growth in our understanding of chemical and biological processes and the remarkable advances in science and technology over the past half century or more now place extraordinary demands on individuals aspiring to become researchers. Complex challenging issues (e.g., development of new cancer therapies) require researchers to possess an extensive educational background and both broad and deep expertise in several areas within a given discipline or across multiple disciplines. College-level introductory general chemistry textbooks now average over one thousand pages and reflect the enormous educational and experiential preparation beginning at the freshman level and continuing through the postdoctoral appointment and beyond. This high 14 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


degree of specialization is a driving force for faculty to seek collaborations with colleagues in different fields, albeit different fields within the natural sciences. Moreover, such specialization compartmentalizes academic researchers and subtly reinforces a “two culture” view of science as separate from society. Recognizing the need for better public engagement, the National Science Foundation and other federal funding agencies have for decades required research proposals to include some assessment of the broader impacts of the proposed research. The criteria encompass impacts on the scientific community (e.g. the intrinsic merit of the proposed research and its contribution to science infrastructure) and for society as a whole (e.g. new knowledge and solutions to societal problems and the development of new technologies). In 1997, a broader impact statement became a formal distinct review criterion but was met with significant resistance within the scientific community (10). Voices critical of the broader impact criterion cite that the primary mission of federally funded research is to advance the frontiers of knowledge and that the tangible benefits arising from fundamental discoveries are not always immediately evident. The primary role of basic research is to serve as a catalyst for future innovation and the development of new technologies (11, 12). However, in order to remain competitive in an increasingly globalized economy and protect the health and welfare of the public and the environment, adequate funding for basic research requires a scientifically literate and appreciative citizenry; therefore, such views do not obviate the scientific community’s need to engage the public in order to improve the public’s understanding of the value of basic research (13–16). Today, almost all research-based universities have dedicated and staffed resource centers to assist faculty in communicating the potential benefits of their research to society. Impacts can be as varied as facilitating the participation of women, persons with disabilities, and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields, increasing scientific literacy and public engagement with science and technology, developing partnerships between academia, industry, and others, and enhancing infrastructure for research and education. If science education or science literacy is important, then we need persuasive justifications for emphasizing science in all aspects of public life. Misunderstandings, even animosity, can arise when scientists and other stakeholders in our society fail to adequately inform each other. Numerous surveys have shown that the public has difficulty distinguishing pseudoscience from science and that a sizable opinion gap exists between the general public and scientists on a range of science and technology topics including, the safety of genetically modified foods, human evolution, vaccination requirements, and climate change (17). Science literacy among entering college undergraduates is only slightly higher than in the general public on basic science questions, even for those freshmen majoring in STEM fields (18, 19). Keeping this history in mind, and intensely aware of the often quite different disciplinary logics of fields that organize the undergraduate curriculum, our approach to cross-disciplinarity in our class was going to need to help students understand how scientific disciplines function and change across time in different historical contexts. In so doing, it would also help students understand ways in which science, contrary to the logic of “two cultures,” remains an aspect of a larger 15 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


culture and society, not its own separate island. In other words, we would explore the ramifications of a “one culture” model, while not downplaying the power of disciplinary specialization and its institutionalization in the modern university. Hence, work in STS, Science and Literature, and Science Studies over the recent decades would inform our perspective. Those fields tend both to emphasize the limitations of the “two cultures” model (especially in the past before disciplines emerged, but also in the present when it remains an oversimplification), but also to explore the dynamics, features, and repercussions of disciplinarity. For example, in a key volume on Literature and Science, Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, simultaneously critique Snow’s thesis while acknowledging that “knowledge production in the modern world increasingly proceeds through the specialized or technical languages that enclose separate disciplinary spheres (20).”George Levine perhaps articulated best what would become a defining logic of our course, when he argued in an influential collection on the subject that “It is possible and fruitful to understand how literature and science are mutually shaped by their participation in the culture at large---in the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, social, economic, and political communities which both generate and take their shape from them (21).”

Pedagogical Approach The course we envisioned was to be a basic general education course of value to any undergraduate student, including those in their first or second year at Penn State who had not moved far along in any disciplinary curriculum as well as students who had already chosen majors. The goal was to make the interdisciplinary course appeal to groups of students from widely divergent disciplinary backgrounds. Students from the sciences might see it as an engaging way to earn required humanities general education credits, and students in the humanities might see it as a less intimidating way to gain their natural science general education credits than they might find in our more conventional science offerings. Students not majoring in the humanities or sciences, in English or Chemistry, would be encouraged as well. We knew that we could not presuppose any background knowledge of the History or Philosophy of Science or the fields of Literature and Science, Science Studies, or STS, and that we could not ask students to read deeply in the fairly demanding work of seminal thinkers whose scholarship might be at the heart of a graduate or advanced undergraduate seminar. Such a course might assign writings by Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Bruno Latour, Weibe Bijker, Mary Jo Nye, William R. Newman, Lawrence Principe, Evelyn Fox Keller, George Levine, Bruce Clarke, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Karen Barad, Susan Merrill Squier, or Richard M. Doyle, for instance. Rather, we selected primary works of literature from the Romantic Period through the present that eloquently and with complexity spoke to key issues in the history of modern chemistry (and its predecessors Natural Philosophy and even Alchemy) and in the culture and society from which it emerged and which it shaped. Because the contemporary disciplinary boundaries of modern chemistry 16 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


were only gradually emerging across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we felt free to draw together issues that might now be seen as “belonging” to biology or physics---evolution, electricity, or vitalism, for example---in part to help demonstrate the web of thoughts that drew together scientific discourse and the religious imperatives of the period, or social or even economic anxieties or concerns that could all-too-easily now be dismissed as “outside” of science. The course teaches both basic concepts of chemistry and their cultural elaboration in literature across the modern period. It seeks to provide students with a nuanced understanding of how literature and science inform each other and negotiate cultural, religious, and political tensions. In science curricula, understanding the origin and development of these ideas and discoveries is an essential component of science and scientific achievement, but too often our methods of teaching science focus almost exclusively on teaching facts and theories at the expense of the historical discovery and development of those facts and theories. In designing our course, we chose writings that could facilitate discussion of scientific facts and theories and the contexts of their production and improve students’ abilities to critically evaluate facts. Texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, or poetry about chemical warfare from the First World War, among others, mirror the cultural perceptions of science during their respective time periods and provide a framework for discussion, or, in the case of a novel such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, have even shaped the scientific discourse of fields such as in vitro fertilization. A number of these texts have been required reading for many students in high school (e.g., Frankenstein or Brave New World), but there they are typically taught solely from a literary perspective. For each literary work, our discussion of the science is a framed narrative involving multiple story lines with a common point of intersection, the author’s own perception of and engagement with the culture of science. In the end-of-semester evaluations, students praise this real-world big picture approach to scientific discovery as being more informative and more engaging than a simple recitation of the information known at the time a novel was written. This holds true in other chemistry-major courses too. A similar approach can be used when introducing students to new concepts in a sophomore-level analytical chemistry course, for example, or in senior-level instrumental analysis courses such as chromatography and chemical spectroscopy. For example, in an analytical chemistry course Dan Sykes teaches, to introduce the chemistry of oxidation-reduction equilibria, his lectures weave together seven separate story lines: the search for the fabled Northwest Passage, the fall of the Roman Empire, James Polk’s “54’40” or Fight” campaign slogan, heavy metal contamination in Flint Michigan and Minamata Bay, Japan, Prince Edward Island mussels, and climate change. The narrative is a mix of historians’ accounts of science and non-science events coupled to the chemistry and mathematics of chemical equilibria. Chemistry students cite these lectures as their favorite aspects of the courses which instill in them a greater desire to learn the material. To illustrate this narrative approach in our Chemistry and Literature course, we will turn to the example of Frankenstein. It is widely known, that the 1818 17 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


novel evolved from Mary Shelley’s efforts in a ghost story contest with Romantic poet Lord Byron and English physician and writer John William Polidori. But few students know of the more subtle cultural and science-based influences on Shelley. Beginning with discussion of the theatrical and visual culture of Frankenstein---from early productions on the London stage through a century of movies---we then turn to the rich social and scientific contexts of Mary Shelley’s novel. Using a combination of lectures and class discussions, we establish that the understanding of electrical phenomena and anatomy and physiology were in the midst of very public revolutions and the converging paradigm shifts from which modern chemistry emerged and separated from its alchemical roots. By the mid-1700s, the first crude electrical devices, static electricity generators and Leyden jars (the first capacitors), were in common use to study the electrical properties of substances. However, it was not known if all electrical phenomena were equivalent (e.g., lightening and static discharges). As told today, the story of Benjamin Franklin and his kite experiment is more the stuff of legend than of history, but, in fact, the experiment did prove that all electrical phenomena arise from the transfer of charge between objects. Franklin, one of the world’s foremost experts on electrochemistry, believed electricity was transferred via positive charge (the electron had not yet been discovered), and so today, the direction of current flow in electrical circuits, from the positive to negative electrode (a convention opposite to that of electron flow), honors his original contributions to science. Meanwhile in 1781, Luigi Galvani demonstrated that the electrical stimulation of nerves produced muscle contractions, which led him and others to believe that electricity was the Vital principle (22). Alessandro Volta agreed with Galvani that muscle contractions could be induced via electrical stimulation but that the source of the electric “principle” arose from an electrical discharge between the prongs of a bimetallic probe and was not due to an intrinsic “animal electricity (23).” In 1800, Volta developed the first electrochemical cell or pile – later known as a Voltaic pile in honor of his achievement---to prove the concept of bimetallic electricity. The pile was made from alternating plates of copper and zinc insulated from each other by cloth, or paperboard, soaked in a brine solution. Each cell, consisting of one copper plate and one zinc plate separated by paperboard, provided approximately one volt of electricity. All modern batteries operate based on the same underlying principles as the Voltaic pile. We use the term “battery” today because Franklin used the phrase to describe a set of Leyden jars connected in series, an arrangement similar to a battery of military armaments. The Voltaic pile was a significant discovery because battery cells could be constructed to achieve any magnitude of voltage and provide a constant source of electricity. In contrast, static electricity machines and Leyden jars instantaneously and completely discharged their voltages. By 1808 the alkali metals sodium and potassium (Na and K) and the alkaline earth elements magnesium, calcium, strontium, and barium (Mg, Ca, Sr, Ba) were discovered by Sir Humphry Davy using a voltaic pile. By the early-1800s, the major medical colleges had made rapid advances in understanding human physiology and recognized that electrical impulses were part of the communication network within neural pathways. The Murder Act of 1751 18 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


provided a new source of cadavers for the anatomy and physiology houses in England. At the time, thieving and murder were both capital offenses so in order to differentiate the severity with which the crimes were viewed, Parliament enacted a law which “for better preventing the horrid crime of murder” provided for “some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy be added to the punishment of death.” The added insult insured that the accused’s body would not be buried but instead sentenced to either public dissection or “hanging in chains”. All of the major medical schools, or Surgeon’s Colleges, in England and Europe offered weekly dissection demonstrations to the public in their anatomical theaters. Although these public displays were of scientific merit, some were quite gruesome---especially those performed on live animals. The experiments incurred widespread moral censure and helped fuel the antivivisection movement in England. Indeed, the rivalry between two preeminent early 1800s neurosurgeons, English physician Charles Bell and French physician Francois Magendie, over the identification and functions of motor and sensory nerve action was inflamed in part by Bell’s claim that these discoveries could be made via observation alone and not under the horrific conditions of the French vivisectionists (24). Convinced that animal electricity was the Vital principle, Galvanists performed public demonstrations on corpses using high power Voltaic piles. The first and most notable demonstration in England was the electrification of the corpse of the convicted murderer George Forster in 1803. A nephew of Galvani, Giovanni Aldini, performed the demonstration, explaining: “the experiments I did on the hanged criminal did not aim at reanimating the cadaver, but only to acquire a practical knowledge as to whether galvanism can be used as an auxiliary, and up to which it can override other means of reanimating a man under such circumstances (25).” The event was quite the spectacle: “On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion (26).” Because of the intensely competitive nature of anatomical and neurological research and the public popularity and, in some cases, infamy of the public dissections, the College of Surgeons regularly conducted these demonstrations on all hanging victims. In fact, the shortage of cadavers became so acute that acts of burking and the fear of being “burked”---being murdered and your cadaver sold for dissection (named after William Burke who was convicted of committing said act on multiple occasions)---were common newsprint articles, and prompted passage of the Anatomy Act of 1832. Many of the public demonstrations involving the Galvanism of corpses bordered on the spectacle conducted by charlatans operating under the guise of “authentic” research (27). The course delves much deeper into the electrical experiments conducted by the individuals mentioned above and others, and makes extensive use of hands-on demonstrations which, though informative, are also quite entertaining. Classroom demonstrations of homemade versions of static electricity generators, Leyden jars, and Voltaic piles, for example, augment class discussions of the science of the period. 19 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Although not a common term of identification, the “Romantic” Scientists (Note: the term “scientist” was first used in 1824), which include Humphry Davy, Thomas Beddoes, William and Caroline Herschel, Joseph Banks and William Lawrence, were part of a close circle of friends with the Romantic Poets: Lord Byron, Samuel Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Robert Southey. These lectures, discussions, and demonstrations of the scientific issues and their social contexts are woven into the fabric of class discussions that produce intricate close readings of the novel itself. Students participate in group activities to develop readings of the novel in relationship to epistemological, social, and moral philosophies of the period that situate science in broader contexts of education, theories of human nature, social contract theory, gender issues, and the role of empirical observation in the development of knowledge (derived from brief passages from the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin, for example). The literary discussions of Frankenstein allow students to understand the way issues of scientific ambition, paradigm shifts, and scientific progress were part of larger social, c ultural, philosophical, psychological, and even political concerns of the period, for example, about the moral responsibilities of discovery, the impact of science on the social structure of the family and the state, as well as on the health of the psyche, the nature of loss and grief, and even about the fundamental nature of life itself and of the relationship of humans to nature and God. To teach the history of the scientific understandings of chemistry, biology (anatomy, physiology, and vitalism, for example), and electricity simply in terms of discoveries, experiments, and great scientists, as an older historiography of science would dictate, misses all of the social, cultural, and moral contexts of that science. Focusing on a literary text like Frankenstein brings all of these issues together in a compelling and thoughtful way that is accessible to any student in a General Education class with a little help from the instructors. Just as the Chemistry instructor must teach the students the historical as well as current understandings of the sciences invoked in Frankenstein, the English instructor must teach the students how to read a work of early 19th-century literature as a literary text. Close reading tools and careful attention to the implications of phrasing and literary techniques open up a much more sophisticated understanding of Mary Shelley’s text, of the meanings the text produces. And those textual analysis skills directly augment the complexity of the students’ understanding of the science of the period, which, across the semester, in turn gives them a more nuanced understanding of 21st-century science, technology, and society.

Course Assignments In developing the syllabus for a class where both the humanities student and the science student can feel at a disadvantage with respect to subject matter the other finds more familiar, it is important to consider a balanced set of graded assignments. We thought it best to develop several graded exercises that would align with the strengths of each type of student in roughly equal weight and to include some group assignments that would encourage students from different 20 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


backgrounds to collaborate together. The breakdown is as follows: two literary analysis papers of 6-8 pages in length (25% total), one science and culture paper 6-8 pages in length (10%), one group presentation on science and culture (10%), one group science demonstration (5%), class attendance and participation (10%), and a final exam (40%). The science and culture paper assignment asks students to write on a topic important to society and science during the time period between 1750 and the present. We advise students to narrow the thesis of the paper to a single issue but to avoid focusing on a biography of an individual or the narrow history of a single item. Instead, the paper should focus on the impact a particular area of science has had on society as evidenced in the arts and literature (or the reverse). The “area” should be well-defined and narrow in scope. For instance, the theory of evolution is too broad but focusing the narrative on a particular aspect of evolutionary principles is acceptable. We provide as an example the "Hockey Stick" graph, a plot representing Earth’s average temperature over time that became central to the larger controversy and debate over climate change. Many students choose topics relevant to their majors. As we wanted the course to be discussion-driven, we felt it important that the students have the opportunity to lead the class. The group presentation is a 15-minute presentation to the class on a topic germane to the course. The list of potential topics is immense but groups are encouraged to explore ideas from current events, journals, or accounts of scientific controversies, and they are told that their analysis should go beyond simple “good/bad” considerations. Some of the topics that have been presented include cloning and/or artificial life, embryonic stem cell research, pesticides or fertilizer, mood enhancing/altering drugs (including psychedelics), nanotechnology (including speculative aspects, such as Human Enhancement), fracking, mining, and their associated chemical technologies, climate change, the “Demarcation Problem” in the philosophy of science, science and warfare (chemical warfare in WWI, atomic warfare in WWII, biological warfare), the regulation of science (history of regulation, politics of uncertainty, risk culture, or debate about expertise and public irrationality), among many other topics. Though we encourage students to prepare a carefully focused presentation, we stopped enforcing the 15-minute time limit because the presentations stimulate high quality interactions among the students which often last upwards of an hour in a 75-minute class. The group demonstration is an assignment to promote chemical literacy, requiring students to conduct a science experiment and use science terminology in front of their peers. The demonstration can be an enhanced version of a demonstration currently used in any chemistry classroom illustrating an important chemical concept or it can be a completely new idea. Each member of the group is expected to understand the chemical principles behind the demonstration and to participate in the development and delivery of the presentation. The group demonstration is evaluated based on the following criteria: the significance of the scientific concept, the educational value or how well it demonstrates a scientific principle, the safety and practicality, and the entertainment value of the demonstration (whether the demonstration was engaging). 21 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

We spend a significant amount of time working with each student and group in developing the thesis topics for their papers and in developing their presentations. Almost all chemistry and physics departments have a science demonstration support facility and personnel that can work with faculty and students on their demonstrations and many of the demonstrations involve off-the-shelf equipment and supplies.


Curricular and Institutional Obstacles and Opportunities Inter- or cross-domain courses face a number of significant hurdles to achieve departmental buy-in and approval through the curricular review process. The success of such courses, from a faculty and student perspective, requires a substantial time commitment, at least initially, on the part of the faculty members developing and teaching the course. Both faculty must not only develop and integrate materials within their own specialized domains but also dovetail those materials with each other in a meaningful way. Proper coordination takes ongoing effort even beyond the initial offering. Often department heads are not so free with faculty release time (and by extension, faculty salary) to develop courses or to award full teaching credit for a collaborative teaching effort, especially when existing courses in the major and high enrollment service courses need to be taught. Departments that support inter-domain initiatives can encourage faculty to develop those courses by granting full-time teaching credit, at least during the development stage. These classes can also be strong candidates for other kinds of enhancement funds---to take students to a science and technology museum in the area or to bring an author to campus whose writing relates to the course focus. At most universities, ownership of such courses is also a matter of concern. Inter-domain courses tend to be pet projects that appeal to the interests of a particular faculty member and, if he or she leaves or rotates out of teaching, two departments are left with an orphaned course in the course catalog. One alternative approach is to link existing individual courses. Although developing links between two courses requires dedicated effort on the part of the faculty instructors, each instructor receives full course credit for their teaching assignment as opposed to half-time credit for a shared course. Students are required to take both courses, which may be a significant drawback for students who discover that the first course in the two-course sequence does not meet their expectations or stimulate their interests. Penn State’s recent General Education revision now requires students to take either two courses that are certified as inter-domain or two linked courses that address a subject from two different disciplinary perspectives. Our course works well as a stand-alone inter-domain course but other institutions that offer classes like our linked course option, could support an initiative similar to our course but offered instead as linked Chemistry and English courses. Such an approach might gain curricular flexibility and avoid asking administrators to expend the resources required to offer team-taught courses. But it would lose the synergies and energies of class discussions shaped by a Chemistry and an English instructor interacting 22 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


in the same room, teaching material together, and modelling cross-disciplinary conversation directly to the students. By their very nature, inter-domain courses are not exact equivalents to their peer-specialized domain courses. Student learning outcomes in inter-domain courses differ significantly from the other same-level courses within the Chemistry and English programs, as the cross-disciplinary integrative thinking is the major goal itself. Other faculty, including members of a Faculty Senate, may not fully appreciate or agree with such approaches, deeming inter-domain courses an easy way to earn a general education credit from a particular program. However, the current cafeteria-style selection of general education courses do not readily map to a set of core competencies and rarely relate back to a student’s major. As a result, students typically view general education courses as unnecessary and a waste of time (2, 28). The Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute strongly advocate the redesign of college programs to outcome-based competency-driven general education curricula; therefore, the traditional approach seems likely to wane as a viable model for developing core twenty‐first century skills. The enthusiastic engagement with science as a vital, if contested, aspect of our 21st century culture that we hope our class cultivates pays off in developing the cross-disciplinary collaborative critical thinking skills that are the goals of many emerging General Education curricula. Whether a university assesses its curriculum in terms of outcome-based competencies or other more traditional educational aims, a course that integrates the perspectives of the humanities and the sciences is certain to provide a valuable experience for any student, and we think that chemistry is so central to many of the key social, cultural, political, and moral issues of the 21st century that a course linking chemistry and literature could win the approval and support of your college or university.

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National Leadership Council for Liberal Education & America’s Promise. College Learning for the New Global Century; Association of American Colleges and Universities: Washington, DC, 2007; p 19. Laird, T. F. N.; Garver, A. K. The Effect of Teaching General Education Courses on Deep Approaches to Learning: How Disciplinary Context Matters. Res. Higher Educ. 2010, 51, 248–265. For example, see the call for integration in the curriculum in The National Task Force on Civic Learning & Democratic Engagement. A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future; Association of American Colleges and Universities: Washington, DC, 2012. Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed.; University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 1963. Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959); Martino Publishing: Mansfield Centre, CT, 2013; p 4. 23 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

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Kimball, R. “The Two Cultures’ today: On the C. P. Snow–F. R. Leavis controversy.”. The New Criterion. 1994February12, 10–15. Small, H. The Value of the Humanities; Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2013; p 35. Sokal, A. D. Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Social Text. 1996, 46/47, 217–252. Abbott, A. Chaos of Disciplines; University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 2001; p 134. Rothenberg, M. Making Judgments about Grant Proposals: A Brief History of the Merit Review Criteria at the National Science Foundation. Technol. Innov. 2010, 12, 189–195. Kamenetzky, J. R. Opportunities for impact: Statistical analysis of the National Science Foundation’s broader impacts criterion. Sci. Pub. Pol. 2013, 40, 72–84. Perspectives on Broader Impacts; National Science Foundation Publication 15-008; U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 2015. Taking science to school: Learning and teaching science in Grades K-8; National Research Council, The National Academic Press: Washington, DC, 2007. Liu, X. Beyond Science Literacy: Science and the Public. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Educ. 2009, 4, 301–311. Brossard, D.; Lewenstein, B. V. A Critical Appraisal of Models of Public Understanding of Science: Using Practice to Inform Theory. In Communicating Science: New Agendas in Communication; Kahlor, L., Stout, P., Eds.; Routledge: New York, 2009; pp 11−39. Watts, S. M.; George, M. D.; Levey, D. J. Achieving Broader Impacts in the National Science Foundation, Division of Environmental Biology. BioSci. 2015, 65, 397–407. Funk, C.; Rainie, L. An Elaboration of the findings in the AAAS member survey; Pew Research Center Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society: Washington, DC, January 2015. Impey, C.; Buxner, S.; Antonellis, J.; Johnson, E.; King, C. A Twenty-Year Survey of Science Literacy Among College Undergraduates. J. Coll. Sci. Teach. 2011, 40, 31–37. Harrison, H. L., II; Reed, P. A. Comparing High School Students’ and Adults’ Perceptions of Technology. J. STEM Teach. Educ. 2016, 51, 3–15. Clarke, B.; Rossini, M. “Preface.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science; Clarke, B., Rossini, M. Eds.; Routledge: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 2011; p xvi. Levine, G. “One Culture: Science and Literature.” In One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature; Levine, G. Ed.; University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, WI, 1987; pp 5−6. Piccolino, M. Luigi Galvani’s path to animal electricity. Neuroscience 2006, 329, 303–318. Piccolino, M. The bicentennial of the Voltaic battery (1800-2000): the artificial electric organ. Trends Neurosci. 2000, 23, 147–151. 24 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


24. Gallistel, C. R. Bell, Magendie, and the proposals to restrict the use of animals in neurobehavioral research. Am. Psych. 1981, 36, 357–360. 25. Parent, A. Giovanni Aldini: From Animal Electricity to Human Brain Stimulation. Can. J. Neurol. Sci. 2004, 31, 576–584. 26. "George Foster Executed at Newgate, 18th of January, 1803, for the Murder of his Wife and Child, by drowning them in the Paddington Canal; with a Curious Account of Galvanic Experiments on his Body". The Newgate Calendar, London, 1803. 27. Morus, I. R. Shocking bodies: Life, death & electricity in Victorian England; The History Press: Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2011. 28. Vander Schee, B. A. Changing General Education Perceptions through Perspectives and the Interdisciplinary First-Year Seminar. Int. J. Teach. Learn. Higher Educ.. 2011, 23, 382–387.

25 Kloepper and Crawford; Liberal Arts Strategies for the Chemistry Classroom ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Chemistry of Literature, Literature of Chemistry - ACS Publications

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