Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education - Introduction

At the end of the 20^th century, Fourez asked the question: Do we teach biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, or do we teach young people how to cope with their own world? Answering this question has led science educators to a rethinking of scientific literacy and thinking about science education as in terms of ‘participation in the community’.

This approach resonates well with the concept of ‘one-world’ chemistry (OWC). In 2016, the IOCD group Chemists for Sustainability published a paper on OWC in which they proposed that chemistry needs to be reoriented as a science for the benefit of society, tackling global challenges and contributing to sustainable development. To do so, they argued that chemistry needs to adopt systems thinking.

What are the implications for how chemistry is taught? OWC does NOT argue for the abandonment of teaching individual sciences in favour of an undifferentiated ‘general science’. It DOES argue for:

• Stressing the unity of scientific principles and thought processes from the earliest stages of science education;
• The development of a clear and deep understanding of the principles and practice of chemistry as a science in its own right, that constitutes a unified system;
• Embedding in chemistry education, from a very early stage, a growing awareness of the ways that chemistry interconnects with other disciplines; the way that chemistry can be used to understand, explain and tackle problems in the physical and biological domains of world around us; and the way that chemistry and other disciplines can work together to develop a collective and comprehensive view of how physical and biological systems behave, interact and affect one another.

OWC especially stresses that:
Systems thinking is essential in the teaching, learning and practice of chemistry. This must recognize that human and animal health and the biological and physical environments of the planet are all intimately connected systems and that the solutions that chemistry develops to contemporary challenges must be informed by an awareness of the interactions between these systems.

A number of benefits can be anticipated from the incorporation of systems thinking into chemistry education, including:

• Viewing chemistry itself as a system can help make the subject more comprehensible and coherent, rather than appearing as a massive list of facts to be learned, so that teaching and learning are facilitated;
• Connecting chemistry with real-world contexts can help to make the discipline more attractive to potential students;
• Acquiring skills in systems thinking can help those in the chemical sciences to tackle the sustainability challenges faced by the world, which involve the interactions with planetary and societal systems;
• The learner develops skills in thinking on a system scale and seeing how systems interact and influence one another, facilitating understanding and solving complex, multi-dimensional problems.
• The capacity for systems thinking is a transferable skill which, once acquired, can be applied in many complex situations – a lifelong benefit for students of chemistry who do not go on to work in the discipline.