Systems Chemistry Education

I recently attended an American Chemical Society sponsored webinar on “Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education”. Since my area of research involves complex systems, and I get paid to be a chemistry educator, you might think that I’d automatically incorporate systems-thinking into teaching my chemistry classes. Well, I do and I don’t. Mostly because I haven’t spent the time seriously thinking about how the two should complement each other in my classes. So this was an opportunity to learn from others who have been thinking about the issue.

 

The presenters provided an overview, some specific examples of how systems thinking might be incorporated into General Chemistry, potential future directions, and some resources. I learned that the Dec 2019 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is devoted to this topic. I read three papers highlighted by the presenters in their examples, and today’s blog post will focus on one of them – the overview introductory article that sets the stage. (Abstract and citation shown below.)

 

The article begins by recognizing the useful role of reductionism in both scientific discovery and science education. Reductionism has its limitations, and often is contrasted with Emergence. While the two might be inverses of each other in complicated systems, this is not true for complex systems. And many systems that we deal with are complex. I’m pleased that Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s contributions are prominently highlighted in the article, and that the way systems thinking is described was not overly-simplistic (which I feared it might be before reading the article fully). In particular, systems thinking was not pushed as the panacea nor a substitute for present approaches that have worked well over the years, but rather as a potential enhancing complement in appropriate areas.

 

Systems thinking is defined as “the ability to understand and interpret complex systems and involves the following…”

·      Visualizing the interconnections and relationships between the parts of the system

·      Examining behavior that changes over time; and

·      Examining how systems-level phenomena emerge from interactions between the system’s parts.

I also found the “Systems Thinking Hierarchical Model” (the triangle shown with the abstract above) useful as a guide to seeing the different aspects at which a student might engage in systems thinking.

 

From the examples provided, the second semester of G-Chem (covering thermodynamics, kinetics, and equilibrium) seems to be a good place to incorporate systems thinking. The sense that I get from the examples is about seeing the chemistry in context by highlighting the systems-level features. Most of us already provide application-examples for context in our classes, but these are usually discussed briefly and anecdotally rather than probed more carefully for those systems-level features. Environmental science and sustainability seem to be the prime contextual targets, and the aim seems to be “educating future global citizens”.

 

Incidentally, in preparing for my upcoming G-Chem 2 class, I had been thinking about how science builds limited models as a way of studying systems via reductionism. Thermodynamics provides a prime example. By defining closed systems with particular idiosyncratic boundaries between subsystems, we’ve stripped out the complex parts, and over-simplified the system such that it no longer behaves as a complex system. That’s partly why entropy has to be introduced as a separate concept. We do this all the time in science, and we’ve similarly done so in science education especially as we moved towards mass education. Build a box. Reduce the systems. Make machines. Convince yourself that what you’ve made is similar enough to the real thing.

 

I don’t think what I’ve described is what most chemical educators have in mind even if that’s what we’re all engaging in, and I’m not sure that is the systems thinking suggested by the articles I read and the presentations I saw. That being said, I will be trying to introduce a bit of systems thinking into my Honors G-Chem 2 class this coming semester, by meshing what we’re learning to the material students will encounter in a bioenergetics intro-Bio level Honors class that most of them are also enrolled in. I’m not going to do too much this semester because we’re still in a pandemic and I’m teaching online. We all have enough to deal with already so I’m not doing any major overhauls. But I’d like to think about these matters more carefully this summer as I look forward to next year. It will also give me time to read more articles in that Dec issue so I can come up with something that works well!