Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Leadership Does Make a Difference Early in my term as editor of this Journal, I received from a reader a letter that was intended to spur ideas for an editorial comment. The writer had taught mathematics, physics, and chemistry using high school curricula developed during the 1960s. He argued that only one of these curricula, the Chemical Education Materials Study (CHEM Study), today remains an important influence on its discipline, at both the high school and college levels. He attributed this to Glenn Seaborg’s leadership of the CHEM Study project. Though I planned to base an editorial on this letter, other subjects continually intervened. Glenn Seaborg’s death on February 25 of this year has prompted me to wait no longer. In education, as in many other areas, Seaborg’s leadership made a tremendous difference. He served as an excellent model of the melding of research, teaching, and service— the often praised but seldom achieved ideal of an academic career. The CHEM Study project has been chronicled in a book by Richard Merrill and David Ridgway (1). Seaborg’s foreword describes a meeting with a group from ACS and NSF who had “a visionary plan to press upon me” for a new high school chemistry curriculum. Although he was then Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and had numerous other commitments that should have precluded his taking on leadership of such a program, Seaborg accepted. He immediately set about persuading other leaders, such as J. Arthur Campbell and George C. Pimentel, to play major roles in the project. In addition he helped set up a steering committee that included high school and college teachers as well as representatives from industry and ACS. In describing his recruitment of Pimentel, Seaborg allowed that “It is just possible that my role as Chancellor helped induce a Berkeley faculty member to accept this demanding assignment.” Seaborg used his fame and his position effectively to help achieve an important goal. CHEM Study’s influence went well beyond the high school chemistry curriculum. It significantly influenced the introductory college course, both because students were expected to be better prepared and because their attitudes about science were likely to be different. CHEM Study had an extremely strong laboratory component. Students were expected to carry out experiments, think about their results, and use those results to discover characteristics of the physicochemical world. In this regard it was a precursor of current inquirybased and discovery-based laboratory programs at the college level. CHEM Study also resulted in much greater interaction between teachers at the high school and college levels. Because the curriculum was quite different from what had gone before, teacher’s guides, instruction pamphlets, achievement tests, and films were created to complement the text and labo-
ratory manual. A program of summer workshops was designed to help teachers learn how to implement the new curriculum, and many teachers today still remember fondly their participation. Both professional development and personal contacts served them well for many years. Teachers from high schools and colleges who participated in the CHEM Study writing teams were also greatly influenced. Because certain kinds of experiments were difficult or impossible to carry out in a high school setting, CHEM Study prepared 27 films for students. CHEM Study’s use of media and its criteria for selection of film topics foreshadowed the current interest in multimedia instruction (2) and would sound up-to-date today. In addition, CHEM Study has served as a model for subsequent curriculum development projects. For example, the call for proposals for the five systemic undergraduate chemistry initiatives currently being supported by NSF included a reference to the dearth of curricular innovation since that initiated in the 1960s by CHEM Study and the Chemical Bond Approach (CBA) projects. Glenn Seaborg’s leadership in chemical education arose out of his strong belief in the importance of making science accessible to everyone. He was willing to take time out of an extremely busy career to support education and to serve the public as well as to serve science and advance his own career. Some readers will remember that the discovery of plutonium, which Seaborg had voluntarily kept secret throughout World War II, was first announced on a radio program, in answer to a question from a young student. His 15 papers in this Journal, his participation in honoring each of the last two editors upon their retirement, his many talks at meetings of high school and college chemistry teachers, and most recently his willingness to chair the Editorial Board of the Journal ’s Viewpoints series all attest to Seaborg’s strong commitment to science education. In an interview published in this Journal in 1975 (3), Seaborg indicated that if he were a 21-year-old bachelor’s degree holder starting his career in that year, he would go into biology. “I believe that this is the area where the greatest contributions to knowledge, to mankind, to human welfare, to the satisfaction of one’s own curiosity and one’s drive towards intellectual achievement can be made.” This indication of the goals to which his career was dedicated shows why Glenn Seaborg was a great leader, and why his leadership indeed made a tremendous difference. Literature Cited 1. Merrill, R. J.; Ridgway, D. W. The CHEM Study Story; Freeman: San Francisco, 1969. 2. Ibid., appendix C. 3. Seaborg, G. T.; Ridgway, D. W. J. Chem. Educ. 1975, 52, 70–75.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 76 No. 5 May 1999 • Journal of Chemical Education
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