To understand something new, in a meaningful way, is to explicitly connect it to one's prior knowledge and experiences in a non-trivial way. This is in contrast to the opposite pole of a continuum: something learned verbatim, passively, by mere repetition, to be parroted on cue, and otherwise remain isolated in memory from any other knowledge to which it might relate.Compatible with this view, Ellen J. Langer has written two books about what constitutes 'mindfulness' and about the value of 'mindful learning' is (Langer, 1989(Langer, , 1997. Mindful learning, to Langer, means learning in ways that will make what we have learned more broadly transferable to new situations and thus continue to be useful both in meeting life's challenges and for further learning. She encourages learning by multiple approaches in varied contexts and from varied perspectives. This is to be done by use of a series of increasingly severe challenges, by taking multiple angles of approach to any piece of work, by varying tasks variations so as to minimise dependence on automatic responses, and by consciously monitoring one's current state of understanding or performance. She concludes that setting, and then enabling, an end-state goal of automaticity/routinisation of performance actually creates more problems than it solves, and that promoting fluid, flexible thinking, over a long-term, increases learning and performance levels. To Langer, the context of how we learn something is as important as what we learn.We think the history of chemistry can help chemical educators to develop, use, and investigate materials and strategies that promotes learning in chemistry that is both meaningful and mindful. We agree with D.B. Gowin's definition that learning is a change in the meaning of experience (Gowin, 1981). The overall objective of chemical education is to help students to construct a meaningful and mindful understanding of the nature of matter and changes in matter. If this is so, then knowing from whence these ideas came, how they were constructed over time, how the record of human 'struggles to understand' can illuminate how we know what we know today, will only help learners. They will be enabled to link newly-learned chemical concepts and principles both to their prior knowledge and to the collective historical knowledge of the global chemistry community (Nakhleh, 1992;Wandersee, 1992).
