Exploring opportunities to incorporate systems thinking into secondary and tertiary chemistry education through practitioner perspectives

ABSTRACT

Recently, the chemistry education community has focused considerable effort on incorporating systems thinking into chemistry education as a means to address global challenges such as sustainability. In this project, a series of exploratory workshops was held with secondary educators (N = 12) and tertiary educators and researchers (N = 16), introducing the participants to systems thinking in chemistry education (STICE). Following the workshops, small group semi-structured interviews were conducted to obtain deeper insight into how participants perceived systems thinking in relation to their teaching and research practice. Inductive analysis identified five major themes shared across both cohorts, relating to the perceived affordances and challenges of implementing systems thinking in chemistry education. The paper discusses these themes in relation to curriculum reform efforts, specifically with respect to pre-conditions needed for successful implementation in order to achieve the benefits of systems thinking in the classroom. We propose a possible pathway to realise these advantages.

KEYWORDS:

• Chemistry education
• systems thinking
• sustainability education

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Tom Holme for early discussions on this project and design of the workshops, and Mary-Kay Orgill for helpful discussions. We thank all of the participants in our workshops.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

We also gratefully acknowledge an Interdisciplinary Establishment Grant from the Deakin University Science and Society Network.