Lessons from a Pandemic: Educating for Complexity, Change, Uncertainty, Vulnerability, and Resilience

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed many aspects of our world including the way we teach chemistry. Our emergence from the pandemic provides an opportunity for deep reflection and intentional action about what we teach, and why, as well as how we facilitate student learning. Focusing on foundational postsecondary chemistry courses, we suggest that we cannot simply return to "normal" practice but need to design and implement new ways of teaching and learning based on fundamentally reimagined learning outcomes for our courses that equip students for life after the rupture they have experienced. We recommend that new learning objectives should be guided both by an analysis of existing global challenges and the types of understandings and practices needed to confront them, and by research-based frameworks that provide insights into important areas of knowledge, skill, and attitude development. We identify a core set of competencies along three major dimensions (crosscutting reasoning, core understandings, and fundamental practices) that we believe should guide the design, implementation, and evaluation of chemistry curricula, teaching practices, and assessments in foundational courses for science and engineering majors. The proposed framework adopts systems thinking as the underpinning form of reasoning that students should develop to analyze and comprehend complex global systems and phenomena.

Chemistry 2030: A Roadmap for a New Decade

“…The SIDE vision for Chemistry 2030 comprises an umber of recommendations intended to move towards amore sustainable, innovative, and inclusive chemistry.S ome of them are summarizedh ere, taken mainly from "Rethinking chemistry for acircular economy", [15] "Chemistry 4.0 Growth through innovation in atransforming world" by Deloitte, [9] "A diverse view of science to catalyze change", [13] and "Lessons from aPandemic:Educating for Complexity,Change, Uncertainty,V ulnerability,and Resilience". [11] Angewandte Chemie Guest Editorial…”

Chemistry 2030: A Roadmap for a New Decade

“…The SIDE vision for Chemistry 2030 comprises an umber of recommendations intended to move towards amore sustainable, innovative, and inclusive chemistry.S ome of them are summarizedh ere, taken mainly from "Rethinking chemistry for acircular economy", [15] "Chemistry 4.0 Growth through innovation in atransforming world" by Deloitte, [9] "A diverse view of science to catalyze change", [13] and "Lessons from aPandemic:Educating for Complexity,Change, Uncertainty,V ulnerability,and Resilience". [11] Angewandte Chemie Gast-Editorial…”

“…However, the main lesson we can learn from the pandemic is not, in my opinion, about technology, but about how chemistry education can be more relevant, useful, and attractive. Systems thinking represents a great opportunity to learn chemistry in context, to incorporate key concepts like circular economy and the interconnections between chemistry and our health, our economy, and the future of our planet [11] . The most effective way to adapt chemistry research and industry to the new normal is to reimagine chemistry education.…”

“…This new decade poses many new challenges at many different levels. The SIDE vision for Chemistry 2030 (Figure 4) gathers key recommendations from various organizations, initiatives, and authors and provides a roadmap for the advancement of chemistry and to respond to increasingly complex and interconnected challenges [9, 11, 13, 15] . According to those recommendations, sustainability, innovation, diversity, and education are four pillars that should define our efforts in the next decade.…”

Chemistry in a post-Covid-19 world

“…Talanquer et al 22 in drawing lessons from the pandemic, "As chemistry educators, we cannot stand idly by and simply translate what we have done for more than 50 years into a virtual format to ensure its existence for 50 years more. "…”