Toward the Greening of Our Minds: A New Special Topics Course

Abstract

Nowadays environmentally friendly scientists are conscious about the need to make chemistry "greener". The success of green chemistry depends on the training of the students of today. Facing the need to open students' minds on the greener side of chemistry, a new special-topics course has been developed that covers both the theoretical and practical aspects of green chemistry. The main goal of this course is to motivate the students to use their critical-thinking and problem-solving ability in learning about green chemistry. The originality of this course arises from the unique combination of using diverse pedagogical tools to teach a new chemistry topic as well as the active-learning approach engaging the students in the course material. The course goals, instructional materials, format of the course, grading, evaluation, conclusions of the course are detailed in this article and corresponding Supplemental Material. This outline is designed to provide a model to instructors wishing to integrate a green chemistry course in their curriculum.

Green chemistry teaching in higher education: a review of effective practices

“…Launching a new offering with ''green'' in the title will capture undergraduate interest given the current publicized issues of sustainability and global environmental stewardship (Marteel-Parrish, 2007). Ideas and concepts can be thoroughly discussed and placed within the context of ''real-world'' case studies from the current chemical literature, leading to development of more advanced problems and assignments.…”

“…These can be simply incorporated into either theoretical or practical components of almost any course. An emphasis has previously been placed on highlighting the United States Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards (Cann, 1999;Marteel-Parrish, 2007). These annual recognitions are in five categories: the Greener Synthetic Pathways Award, the Greener Reaction Conditions Award, the Designing Greener Chemicals Award, the Small Business Award and the Academic Award (www.epa.gov/gcc/pubs/pgcc/award_categories.html).…”

The role of green chemistry activities in fostering secondary school students' understanding of acid–base concepts and argumentation skills

“…Although shown to have general benefits, our research does not allow discerning the independent effects of connections with the everyday life or increased argumentation. This encouraged students to actively participate, critically think, discuss, and debate issues to arrive at conclusions and solutions (Eilks, 2002;Marteel-Parrish, 2007. Argumentation-based interventions significantly strengthened the acquisition of scientific reaction rate-related concepts and positively impacted the structure and complexity of pre-service teachers' argumentation (Cetin, 2014).…”

Using Green Chemistry to Enhance Faculty Professional Development Opportunities

“…In addition to the texts listed in the previous section, there are several recent literature examples (45,47,68,75) that incorporate green chemistry principles with industrial and social components. Two people, Margaret Kerr and Mary Kirchhoff, have been awarded Fulbright fellowships to promote green chemistry internationally.…”