Communication pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
ConfChem Conference on Educating the Next Generation: Green and Sustainable ChemistryChemistry of Sustainability: A General Education Science Course Enhancing Students, Faculty and Institutional Programming Julie A. Haack,* J. Andrew Berglund, James E. Hutchison, Darren W. Johnson, Mark C. Lonergan, and David R. Tyler Department of Chemistry, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403, United States S Supporting Information *
ABSTRACT: This paper describes a collaborative project to design and teach a general education science course, Chemistry of Sustainability. Our goal was to show how chemistry plays a central role in addressing the grand challenges of protecting the environment and human health by developing the knowledge and tools that meet our basic needs for energy, clean water, and consumer products. Course content was designed using a case-study approach that illustrates how basic chemical concepts including atomic structure, bonding, intermolecular forces, and reactivity are applied to address environmental issues. The cases tapped faculty research expertise and addressed topics such as renewable energy, sustainable consumer products, bioplastics, clean water, and nanoscience. Because sustainability is an interdisciplinary activity, we illustrated how life-cycle assessment and the principles of green chemistry can be used to provide sustainable chemical solutions. A surprising outcome of this project was the breadth and significance of the impacts on our students, faculty, and institution. This communication summarizes one of the invited papers to the ConfChem online conference Educating the Next Generation: Green and Sustainable Chemistry, held from May 7 to June 30, 2010 and hosted by the ACS DivCHED Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE). KEYWORDS: High School/Introductory Chemistry, First-Year Undergraduate/General, Curriculum, Environmental Chemistry, Analogies/Transfer, Biotechnology, Green Chemistry, Materials Science, Nanotechnology, Nonmajor Courses
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areas of overlap between the grand challenges of the chemical enterprise2 and Richard Smalley’s top ten list of problems facing humanity.3 Course content focused on renewable energy, sustainable consumer products, bioplastics, clean water, and nanoscience. An important theme of the course was to represent chemists as problem solvers. To accomplish this green chemistry4 and life-cycle assessment5 were integrated throughout the course as tools to design more sustainable solutions and enhance decision making around the evaluation of alternatives. Life-cycle assessment6 is a quantitative framework for tracking the impacts of human activity on the environment and is used to compare the environmental impacts of two or more products or processes. Green chemistry is the utilization of a set of principles that reduces or eliminates the use or generation of hazardous substances in the design, manufacture, and application of chemical products. At the University of Oregon, green chemistry had been integrated into our general and
tudents on campuses across the country are expressing a strong interest in sustainability, yet are frustrated by the lack of knowledge and intellectual tools available to facilitate decision making and innovation in this area. This work describes the collaborative design and impacts of an introductory chemistry course, Chemistry of Sustainability, that uses chemistry to explore grand challenges in sustainability. The design strategy was student centered and tapped the strengths of our faculty with respect to their knowledge about green chemistry and their research expertise in areas related to sustainability. The course tied introductory chemistry concepts to case-study modules that utilized life-cycle thinking and green chemistry to help students understand how chemists invent solutions and solve problems of importance to society. All materials developed for this course are available on the Greener Education Materials Database (GEMs).1 The main challenge in developing this course was creating a strategy for integrating chemistry and sustainability in a way that provides faculty with flexibility in terms of designing content for the course and enables students to organize their thinking around specific topics. Our solution was to identify © 2013 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Published: January 14, 2013 515
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed2006899 | J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90, 515−516
Journal of Chemical Education
Communication
organic chemistry curriculum starting in the late 1990s7−9 and by 2006 green chemistry had diffused into the research programs of one-third of our chemistry faculty. It was the opportunity to combine faculty expertise in these areas with rising student interest in sustainability that inspired us to design a large enrollment introductory course for nonscience majors. We utilized collaborative design, team teaching, and case studies to address the need for broad content knowledge and to develop new education materials that integrated green chemistry, life-cycle thinking, and sustainability. Collaborative development encouraged faculty to propose new approaches and challenge assumptions that led the team to quickly gain new perspectives and insights about sustainability. The opportunity for students to observe how different experts showcase the integration of chemistry and sustainability provided a uniquely rich learning environment. Collaboratively designing this course significantly impacted our department and institution on multiple levels. The opportunity to use green chemistry as a tool, throughout the life cycle, inspired students to become engaged in the development of solutions and enhanced their confidence that viable solutions were possible. This personal empowerment was a potent antidote to the hopelessness that students often express as they develop a more sophisticated understanding of the challenges facing society. Integrating faculty research helped students to appreciate the role of basic research in the development of sustainable solutions. The most significant impacts on the department have been the diffusion of course content throughout the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Green chemistry, sustainability, and life-cycle thinking are now integrated into our upper-division inorganic courses and graduate-level materials chemistry courses in semiconductor physics and polymers. In the polymer course, the life-cycle assessments of commodity and bioplastics are compared to other common materials to explore strategies for how to improve manufacturing, use, and degradation and what to do in situations when alternative materials are not available. The inorganic chemistry course covers green chemistry in the context of the catalytic hydration of acetone cyanohydrin to make methylmethacrylate, where students compare the energy and materials efficiencies of the catalytic reaction versus the noncatalytic reaction. The materials created for these courses have evolved and provide the foundation for an introductory graduate workshop on sustainability, a signature experience for incoming graduate students at the University of Oregon. The availability of this course significantly increased the visibility and improved the credibility of chemistry as a legitimate partner in institutional sustainability efforts. After participating in the course, faculty were invited to share their introductory materials with students from other departments in the form of guest lectures and with members of the general public in the form of events called Science Pubs.10 This outreach effort contributed to campus support for a major initiative to create an interdisciplinary Green Product Design Network11 focused on designing integrative solutions and creating tailored, multidisciplinary education programs for our students. This paper was discussed from May 21 to May 27 during the spring 2010 ConfChem online conference, Educating the Next Generation: Green and Sustainable Chemistry. ConfChem conferences are hosted by the ACS DivCHED Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE), are open to the
public, and can be accessed at the CCCE Web site, http:// www.ccce.divched.org/.
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT
* Supporting Information S
The revised ConfChem paper. This material is available via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org.
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
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REFERENCES
(1) Haack, J. A. Chemistry of Sustainability. http://greenchem. uoregon.edu/Pages/Overview.php?WhereFrom=ResultsAll&ID=144 (accessed Nov 2012). (2) National Research Council. Sustainability in the Chemical Industry: Grand Challenges and Research Needs; The National Academies Press: Washington, D.C., 2006. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id= 11437 (accessed Nov 2012). (3) Smalley Institute. Smalley Institute Grand Challenges. http://www. nano.rice.edu/content.aspx?id=246 (accessed Nov 2012). (4) Anastas, P. T.; Warner, J. C. Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice; Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1998. (5) Scientific Applications International Corporation. Life Cycle Assessment: Principles and Practice. http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/std/lca/ pdfs/chapter1_frontmatter_lca101.pdf (accessed Nov 2012). (6) US Environmental Protection Agency. Life Cycle Assessment. http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/std/lca/lca.html (accessed Nov 2012). (7) Hutchison, J. E. Transforming the Organic Chemistry Lab Experience for Students and Educators: Reflecting on Ten Years of Green Chemistry at University of Oregon. http://portal.acs.org:80/ preview/fileFetch/C/CTP_005830/pdf/CTP_005830.pdf (accessed Nov 2012). (8) Exton, D. B. General Chemistry in the Laboratory; McGraw-Hill Publishing: Dubuque, IA, 2003. (9) Exton, D. B. The Greening of the General Chemistry Laboratory, 17th Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA, July 28−August 1, 2002, (A 216). (10) Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Science Pubs. http:// www.omsi.edu/sciencepub (accessed Nov 2012). (11) Haack, J. A. The Green Product Design Network. http://uo-gpdn. ning.com/ (accessed Nov 2012).
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