Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Looking Outward from the Central Science During this 75th year, we have often recalled the past. It is now time to look to the future and ask what we might expect in the next 25 years, as the Journal approaches 100. I have no doubt that this Journal will continue to exist, serving and leading the chemical education community. But in what format and with what content? If the past is any guide regarding lengths of editors’ terms, in 25 years the reins will be held by the ninth editor—someone who is now between 20 and 35 years old. And the Journal will have been shaped by its constituency and its editors into whatever best suits their collective needs and vision. Extrapolating from our current system of print, JCE Online+, and JCE CD, we may well be entirely electronic, both in presentation and distribution. We certainly will have many new features that haven’t been dreamed of today. During the next 25 years, many techniques for transferring all kinds of information via whatever the World Wide Web becomes will certainly be perfected and become obsolete. We probably will be much less constrained by the current schedule of one issue each month. The Journal also is likely to become much more interactive. An example will be coming in the spring when JCE Internet will begin a mediated online discussion of the content of general chemistry that will build on opinions expressed in an online conference sponsored by the DivCHED Computer Committee. And the Journal will almost certainly become more of a repository for materials that teachers can use directly, such as our Classroom Activity Sheets and the computer-readable versions of lab experiments that we now have available. Chemical education research is emerging as a full-fledged subdiscipline that will be able to tell us more and more about what works and what does not in classrooms, laboratories, and other learning environments. Consequently more papers will be published that describe research results that apply directly to how we structure our courses and our students’ activities. The Journal is also likely to include more interdisciplinary material, such as the collection of environmental chemistry papers in this issue. Environmental science, biomedical science, and materials science are vibrant, growing areas of multidisciplinary activity that are largely based on chemistry. Our students need to be aware of and trained to enter these and other emerging multidisciplinary areas, and this needs to happen before, not after, the areas are generally recognized as hot. We teachers, and this Journal as a leader
in 25 years…the Journal will have been shaped by its constituency and its editors into whatever best suits their collective needs and vision.
Let us look outward from our central science, forging new interdisciplinary links and making use of whatever tools we can devise to help students become more broadly and more effectively educated for what lies ahead.
in the community of teachers, need to continue looking ahead to see what chemical science and chemistry students are likely to become. In the past our central science has looked inward more than it has looked outward. We often seem to draw lines in the sand and dare other disciplines to cross them instead of reaching out and making known the broad range of useful ideas we have to offer. Some of this stems from our discomfort at involving students with ideas on which we lack expertise. Biochemistry was certainly peripheral—even nonexistent—in my undergraduate and graduate preparation. Like many other chemistry teachers, I have had no formal education in biochemistry. How then am I to deal with the new guidelines from the ACS Committee on Professional Training, which state that the equivalent of a course on biochemistry should be included in an ACS-approved undergraduate major? And how am I to explain to my students that, given the direction much of the research in our field was going, this decision really ought to have been taken 20 years ago? As a “living textbook of chemistry”, this Journal will need to address this and many similar issues in the next 25 years. JCE must provide forums, background information, scientific insights, and materials for classrooms, laboratories, and other learning environments that help transform the chemical education enterprise to encompass the new directions in which chemistry is likely to move. Your editorial staff cannot do this without continuous input from the community— that is, from you. We need your efforts as innovators and visionaries, as authors of papers that describe successful new approaches, as reviewers who help hone those papers to their sharpest edge, as readers who take new ideas and implement them in even better and more effective ways, and as continuing sources of feedback and suggestions for new initiatives this Journal can take. We are approaching a new millennium that will see tremendous development and change—for this Journal, for chemical education, and for all of chemistry. Let us all redouble our efforts to move ourselves, our students, and our discipline forward. Let us look ahead, not back. Let us look outward from our central science, forging new interdisciplinary links and making use of whatever tools we can devise to help students become more broadly and more effectively educated for what lies ahead.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 75 No. 12 December 1998 • Journal of Chemical Education
1511
