Citizens First! Democracy, Social Responsibility and Chemistry Downloaded from pubs.acs.org by 95.181.182.100 on 09/02/18. For personal use only.
Foreword Traditionally science has been strictly disciplined to march in a very restricted parade arena. The disciplinary walls are especially thick. Guards and billboards have been posted everywhere to maintain order by keeping unruly non-science subjects out and scientists, for the most part, in. The argument has been that the purity of science will be contaminated if mere human life and public issues seep into research studies, labs, and the everyday teaching of science. The consequences of such a stance have harmed the teaching and learning in science and put the bulk of humanity and the planet earth at unnecessary risk. In a recent National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), 61% of seniors responded overall by saying they “often or “very often” connected learning to societal problems or issues in their major. But the contrasts across majors were wildly different. For instance, 78% of seniors in social sciences majors reported connecting societal problems or issues in their major. By contrast, for physical sciences, math, and computer science, only 38% of seniors responded affirmatively. Of the ten clustered majors in the NSSE question, the lowest rated three categories were all science disciplines. If science insisted that public issues had no place in its barracks, Flint, Michigan should have changed all that. But so should have the Atomic bomb, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Or Hurricane Katrina and Harvey, the growing desertification in 168 countries, and the acidification of the ocean. Clear-sighted scientists like Cathy Middlecamp, a chemist by training and long-time author and many years editor-in-chief of Chemistry in Context, have helped lead the way to radically reframing science. “My work is at the intersection of science, people, culture, and the real world issues that we as humans face on this planet,” she writes unabashedly on her University of Wisconsin, Madison website. Middlecamp was a member of my advisory board for a National Science Foundation project I directed almost two decades ago called “Women and Scientific Literacy: Building Two-Way Streets.” Had I taken her chemistry class as an undergraduate, I might very well have gone to graduate school in chemistry instead of English literature. She herself is non-monogamous in her disciplinary affections. At this point in her professional career, she has a joint appointment as a professor in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and in Integrated Liberal Studies. The ability to explore different disciplinary perspectives seems to be one of the keys to marching out of the parade arena, against orders. Middlecamp has been a faculty consultant with another dynamic disrupter of walls, bans, and exclusionary practices: SENCER, Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities. Its premise is a simple one: students would be more engaged in science if science were more engaged with the world ix
and its public issues. The editors of this volume, Richard D. Sheardy and Cynthia Maguire in the chemistry and biochemistry department at Texas Woman’s University, have both been deeply influenced both by Cathy Middlecamp and by SENCER. They have also each taken a stint at running the SENCER Center for Innovation‒ Southwest, housed at TWU. SENCER argues that civic engagement through science can also produce more informed, responsible citizens. So, it is no accident that the name of the first symposium on this topic at ACS was originally dubbed by Middlecamp as “Citizens First!” The name stuck and the papers in this volume, Citizens First!, are largely from the 2017 symposia that Sheardy and Maguire led. The essays to a person are testimonies that science and society can actually make beautiful music together, stronger, more tonal, better beat than those regimented, stiff, constrained marching bands. Sheardy, Maguire and their colleague Nasrin Kohan were selected by my organization, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, as an exemplary model of a chemistry and biochemistry department because they have developed a civic lining throughout the courses in their major that prompts students to think about the public consequences and ethical implications of some of their studies. And they have scaffolded such learning over time for their majors, most of whom become involved in research projects about local issues of import in Denton, Texas. Information about their major and other departmental designs can be found in Peer Review, Civic Learning in the Major, Fall 2017. AAC&U also just awarded twenty-four mini-grants to departments interested in beginning a dialogue about layering civic engagement and social responsibility across levels in the major. Twenty-five percent of the awardees were in science departments: a sign that more scientists have gone AWOL. That is good news for student learning, for scientific discoveries, for the health of the planet and its people, and for the civil society that seems to be dangerously unraveling in the U.S. and many spots around the globe. It is a matter of some significance therefore that the American Chemical Society is publishing volumes like this one. Read it carefully.
Caryn McTighe Musil Senior Scholar and Director of Civic Learning and Democracy Initiatives Association of American Colleges and Universities
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