Chemical Education Today
ACS Presidential Election
The Centrality of Education and Communication by Bruce E. Bursten
www.JCE.DivCHED.org
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education. As Dean of Arts and Sciences at my university, I have had the opportunity to translate good ideas into effective action. For example, we recently hosted about 1000 physicists at the annual meeting of the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP). My college conceived of, and provided full financial support for, the First DAMOP Educator’s Day, in which we brought Bruce E. Bursten more than forty high school teachers of science to attend workshops, hear lectures from Nobel Laureates, and learn more about their craft. It was a terrifically sensible and cost-efficient way to support science education, and I am very pleased that DAMOP has adopted Educator’s Day as a permanent part of their annual meeting. Efforts like this one underscore one of the grand challenges we have as educators: How do we take effective local efforts, which happen in so many of our regions, and cohesively make them effective on a national scale? We in the ACS need to work together to make our local efforts have national impact. I am not sure of all of the best ways to make that happen, but I know many of us have ideas that we can put into action. I look forward to working with you to make ACS more effective in these local-to-national efforts. Education and communication are hardly original foci of candidates for President of the ACS, but I hope to use my experience as an educator, researcher, and communicator, along with the strength of our Society, to make more than incremental progress in science education. We must do more and we must do so now for the good of chemistry and the good of humanity. Literature Cited 1. Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century. Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future; National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 2006. Available in print or online (without charge) at http://darwin.nap.edu/books/ 0309100399/html/R1.html (accessed Aug 2006).
Bruce E. Bursten is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville;
[email protected]. For more information, go to http://www.brucebursten.com (accessed Aug 2006).
Vol. 83 No. 10 October 2006
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Journal of Chemical Education
1453
photo: University of Tennessee
I have spent my career in chemistry as a teacher, researcher, and administrator in academia. I am also a coauthor of one of the leading textbooks in general chemistry. These various roles have been endlessly satisfying, mainly because we as educators have such a capacity to make a difference. We engage students in the wonder of chemistry, we excite them about their career paths, and we develop the next generation of researchers. What a privilege! Chemical education needs to be a top priority of the ACS, and let me assure you that I will make it such if I am elected as ACS President. We all have concerns about mathematics and science education in the U.S. We have all observed some of the disturbing trends in our students: They are generally weaker in mathematics than students used to be. They memorize a lot of facts about chemistry, but have very few skills in critical thinking. Many are obsessed with grades for new originally unanticipated reasons, such as gradepoint-restricted state scholarships. Many of our students consider taking a “real” college science course, much less majoring in science, to be too risky an endeavor. The end result is that we are producing a smaller number of U.S. science students at a critical time when the national and international need for well-trained scientists is extremely great. We in the ACS must address these issues. We need to ensure that students at all levels are provided with incentives to explore chemistry, and that they have the multidisciplinary tools to think broadly about big problems. And, needless to say, we need to continue what contributors to J. Chem. Educ. have always done best: To make certain that the teaching of chemistry is done right, that it is done critically, and that it instills the excitement and importance of our craft. Fortunately, some of the issues in science education have hit the radar screen of the federal government, thanks in large part to the NAS report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm (1). That document is largely responsible for the new federal Competitiveness Initiative that is part of the current administration’s agenda. Nevertheless, the tougher sell is convincing our stakeholders, the U.S. citizenry, that science education is a critical investment, and the ACS must be a leading partner in such efforts. We must use the prominent voice of the ACS to translate our concerns into actions at all levels of the science education enterprise, from elementary school students and teachers to the legislators who prioritize funding for basic and applied research. We are pretty good at communicating among ourselves, but we simply do not do a good job of taking our message to the rest of our world. Like many of you, I am proud of some of the local efforts we have made that have a positive impact on K–12 science
