Political engagement in organic chemistry: an advocacy project utilizing green and sustainable chemistry

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the design and implementation of a political advocacy project in an Organic Chemistry II course. The advocacy project was designed to demonstrate that organic, green, and sustainable chemistry can be applied outside of laboratory and industrial settings to help solve issues related to environmental sustainability. After the instructor identified pending state legislation relating to sustainability, students read and summarized the bill. After class discussion, students did further research into questions raised in the discussion and prepared talking points. The talking points were developed into a white paper or postcard in advance of a class trip to the state capitol to share the views with legislators. Student reflections indicated a positive experience with advocacy, a greater understanding of environmental issues that affect them, and better awareness of how they can affect change.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Undergraduate organic chemistry
• political engagement
• sustainable chemistry
• green chemistry
• education

Introduction

Twenty years ago the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) indicated that general education should promote student learning through the development of critical thinking and civic engagement (1). The goal of civic engagement work is to improve the quality of living in our communities through political and non-political processes (2) including voting, volunteering, political action, and staying informed (3). Most institutions of higher education include an obligation to prepare undergraduates to be civically responsible in their mission and/or goals (4). These goals are typically accomplished through extracurricular activities (usually volunteering) and curricular activities (often through service-learning courses). While volunteering is an important activity that contributes significantly to personal development, academic service-learning activities have significant benefits to the student, teacher, and community (4–6).

In fact, service-learning has been identified by Kuh as a high-impact educational practice (7). The positive effects on the learner's beliefs and values toward service and community (8–13) and on critical thinking and ability to integrate theory (9, 14–19) have been well documented. Consequently, a number of service-learning chemistry examples have been published in the pedagogical literature (20–27) with several courses applying chemical analysis techniques to environmental issues in the community (13, 28–36).

SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagement and Responsibilities) is another pedagogical approach that has been used successfully to integrate civic engagement into the chemistry curriculum (37). SENCER aims to enhance student learning by connecting science content with real world issues through civic engagement (38). The SENCER community has published a variety of chemistry examples in three ACS books (39–41). A number of these examples use environmental issues to engage students in civic engagement activities embedded with in the course. Several courses were designed for non-science majors to engage these students with scientific content and showcase the relevance of science in the general education of all students (42–46).

Additionally, there are a few examples using environmental issues to connect science and community engagement. Tyson has developed a few chemistry courses that explore arsenic in food and water which promote awareness and science literacy through formal and informal learning (47). Metzger developed an environmental justice course that brings together liberal arts students and incarcerated men (48). That course allows students to explore how human activities have environmental consequences and how cultural, political, and economic factors affect environmental policy making. Gurney and Stafford have described two non-major courses that connect green chemistry and civic engagement. The first is a general education honors course designed to map Chemistry in Context (49) topics with real-world cases from Watershed (50, 51) readings. The students researched green consumer products and submitted weekly articles to the student newspaper to inform the campus community. Students also created a green ‘What to Bring to College’ guide for incoming students. Finally, the students initiated and championed the creation of a university-wide sustainability committee. These experiences inspired Gurney and Stafford to design a learning-community course that explores the intersection of green chemistry and environmental ethics. The last two weeks of the course are dedicated to student-designed civic engagement activities (52).

Implied by the AAC&U general education goal is that science students should be civically minded. Nevertheless, since most civic engagement learning opportunities occur in social science, humanities, and non-major science courses, science students are not routinely exposed to the relationship of civic and community engagement to science. However, there are a few examples of courses designed for science majors focused on environmental issues that affect local and/or global communities. Eichler embedded a long-term environmental project into a general chemistry course where the students measure ground-level ozone concentrations as part of a long-term air quality study (53). Latch described a collaborative, interdisciplinary service-learning project between ecology, organic chemistry laboratory, and instrumental analysis courses that involves field sampling, chemical analyses, and research-based experiments (54). Gurney and Stafford described an upper-level capstone seminar for science and engineering students that features the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge award projects as course materials (52). The students organized an event for the campus community to highlight green chemistry research. Bouvier-Brown described three exercises for chemistry courses that integrate atmospheric chemistry and environmental justice (55). This approach brings the focus of environmental education onto the humans affected by environmental problems. The curriculum uses database and student-collected air pollution data sets to analyze a variety of air pollution conditions. While an explicit civic engagement activity is not provided, an instructor could use these assignments to guide the creation of similar datasets for their local area and integrate civic engagement activities through local environmental groups.

Despite the importance of science to many of our local, state, and national debates and policies (56–58), only a couple of examples implementing political engagement into chemistry courses exist in the literature. Jarvis developed a science policy exercise that could be inserted in the laboratory or classroom of any science course and makes a compelling argument for coupling the assignment with green chemistry and sustainability (59). Jarvis describes an exercise where students construct a letter to their U.S. Congress representatives to support a position or action. Jarvis discusses the importance of non-technical writing that describes the scientific importance, various sides, and potentially competing interests of the issue. Similarly, Bastin and Martin developed an advocacy project for a non-major Sustainable Chemistry course that could be implemented into other courses in the chemistry and science curriculum (60). Bastin and Martin focused on state representatives and added a field trip to the state capital to meet with representatives.

Civic and political engagement at Widener

Widener University has a long history of engaging students in High Impact Practices such as service-learning and civic engagement. Central to Widener's civic engagement mission is our location. The City of Chester lies on the Delaware River, a few miles southwest of Philadelphia. Settled as ‘Upland’ by the Swedes in 1644, it is the oldest city in Pennsylvania (61). In 1682, William Penn landed in the city and changed its name to Chester. The city grew to be a prosperous manufacturing hub based on shipbuilding, metal manufacturing and textiles industries. While shipbuilding declined after World War I, other manufacturing, such as a Ford automobile assembly plant, stepped in. Unfortunately, soon after World War II, industries began to abandon the city, resulting in a loss of jobs and subsequent migration of people to surrounding areas. Today, less than 10% of the workforce is employed in manufacturing, with the bulk of employment in healthcare, retail, food service and education (62).

It has been recognized for decades that Chester is an environmental justice community (63, 64). The city is home to the Wade Superfund Site, originally a rubber recycling facility, where thousands of gallons of toxic waste had been stored illegally prior to a disastrous fire in 1978 (65). After remediation, the site was deleted from the National Priorities list in 1989, and it is now a parking lot for the Philadelphia Union. The Wade site is just one of many environmental issues in the city. A residential area along the Delaware River is the site of one of the largest trash-to-steam generators in the country, accepting waste from a wide portion of the Middle Atlantic region (66). Next door is the county's sewage treatment plant, DELCORA (67). The efforts of the community to organize in opposition to serving as a dumping ground for wealthy neighboring suburbs are detailed in the award-winning 1997 documentary, ‘Laid to Waste’ (68). A community activist group, Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL), filed a civil rights suit in 1993 to stop the opening of a large infectious waste facility in an adjacent lot to the Covanta and DELCORA facilities, which had received a permit from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources despite exceeding regulatory limits by a factor of 10 (63). Two years later, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court revoked the permit based on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, confirming that racism had played a role in the location of the waste treatment facilities.

Former Widener President James T. Harris III recognized the needs of Chester and created an opportunity for the university to create a bridge with the community (69). One of the first steps was to create a service-learning fellowship program for faculty members. Service-learning classes are intended to provide a reciprocal benefit to both the student and the community. Community partners may include public schools, non-profit organizations, and agencies. A key requirement of service-learning courses, which receive a special transcript designation, is the opportunity for students to reflect on their experience (pre-service, during service, and post-service) through a combination of class discussion and written reflections.

Service-learning is one of several programs administered by the university's Office of Civic and Global Engagement. Widener offers undergraduate scholarships through the Presidential Service Corps/Bonner Leader program (70). In partnership with Habitat for Humanity, Widener has offered Alternative Spring Break opportunities in which teams of students and faculty work on construction projects in areas of need throughout the country. Widener's nursing, physical therapy, and law students offer low-cost or pro-bono clinics in their communities. The university maintains the Widener Child Development Center which provides nursery, preschool, and kindergarten experiences for children of Chester residents and Widener faculty and staff.

Through the Political Science department in the College of Arts and Sciences, Widener also engages students in political action. Widener works with the non-profit Project Pericles (71) to embed social responsibility and civic engagement in the curriculum. In 2012, university students and faculty formed a political action committee (PAC), called College Students Concerned by College Costs. That group along with a group from our Social Work department regularly participate in the annual Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Pennsylvania (AICUP) Student Advocacy Day (‘Lobby Day’) at the state capitol in Harrisburg. There, students can meet with state legislators and staff to discuss issues of concern. As a collaborator on the Cost of Higher Education project, I developed an interest in the inclusion of political and civic engagement activities in chemistry courses.

Political and civic engagement in a non-major sustainable chemistry course

With the environmental issues of Chester in mind, Bastin and Martin developed and implemented a non-majors course in chemical principles using a sustainability lens and incorporating political and community engagement (60). The course, Sustainable Chemistry, is a three-credit class that fulfills the General Education requirements for a science class without a laboratory. It is a required course for students minoring in Sustainability Science and Sustainability Management and those majoring in Environmental Health and Sustainability Management.

The chemistry content learning goals of the course are similar to other non-majors’ classes but include specific language relating to sustainability and the environment. The course provides an overview of environmental issues, and the role green chemistry plays in addressing these issues. The theme of sustainable innovations and solutions is carried throughout the course. About two-thirds of the regular class periods were used for chemistry content and about one-third of the class periods were dedicated to guest lectures, field trips, and a political advocacy project.

Green chemistry for science majors at Widener University

As a signer of Beyond Benign's Green Chemistry Commitment (72), Widener's chemistry department is dedicated to integrating the following four principles into our student learning objectives: (1) a working knowledge of the Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry, (2) an understanding of the principles of toxicology, (3) an ability to assess chemical products and processes and design greener alternatives, and (4) to be prepared to serve society in their professional capacity. To date, we have successfully integrated the concepts of atom economy, waste, and safety into our General Chemistry labs for science and engineering students. We have a substantial introduction to green chemistry in the Organic Chemistry I laboratory. During weekly one hour lab lecture periods, green chemistry is presented as a solution to current sustainability challenges including pollution, environmental racism, and to meeting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. These presentations highlight sustainability with respect to population growth, energy consumption, and product manufacturing. The sources and finite nature of raw materials are discussed along with waste and pollution. Concepts such as the triple bottom line, ecological footprint, cradle-to-cradle, and green chemistry are introduced as a way of thinking about environmental issues. Students are encouraged to consider how we can be more creative in developing processes that are more sustainable economically, environmentally, and socially. The theme of sustainable innovations and solutions is carried throughout the remainder of the class discussions. The laboratory experiments are designed to introduce green chemistry principles and metrics are scaffolded into the experiments to allow students to perform increasingly sophisticated green chemistry analysis of each experiment (73). Organic Chemistry II carries these topics into the lecture and laboratory components of the course where the focus is mechanisms, synthesis, and spectroscopy. In the lecture component, greener alternatives are presented and discussed alongside traditional methods of functional group transformations and students are given extra credit on homework and exam assignments for providing greener alternatives. The lab continues to introduce new green chemistry topics with a carbonyl reduction followed by elimination (73), polylactide synthesis, Fischer esterification, and a final experiment of a biologically-relevant, three-step synthesis that demonstrates principles associated with greener reagents, energy and atom efficiency and waste reduction (74).

Advocacy project in organic chemistry

The previously described green chemistry focus in our organic chemistry curriculum prepares science and chemical engineering students to be change agents in research and industrial laboratories before and after graduation. However, we want students to learn other ways scientists and engineers can be change agents. Thus, the political advocacy project previously developed for Widener's non-major Sustainable Chemistry course (60) was adapted for the Organic Chemistry II lecture course. Incorporation of community partnerships, tours, and trips was more difficult to include in Organic Chemistry II because the course is significantly larger and the content more prescribed. However, the political advocacy project has been successfully integrated into the course each of the past three years.

The political advocacy project utilizes three class periods spread across the semester. The assignment prompts are included in the supplemental materials and a timeline is provided in Table 1. Prior to the start of the semester, the instructor identifies pending legislation relating to green or sustainable chemistry using the state legislature website (75). Each student submits a paragraph summary of the bill. Over the past three years, examples of bill topics include: (1) a bisphenol A ban, (2) the required addition of a tracer to fracking chemicals, and (3) a 100% Renewable PA by 2050. In the Sustainable Chemistry course (60), the first assignment of the project ask students to identify and summarize bills relating to sustainability. In Organic Chemistry II, the instructor identified the bill to streamline the assignment and avoid the possible discussion of 30 plus different bills. After the submission deadline for the bill summary, the class discusses the bill with a focus on three questions: (1) What questions do we have about the bill? (2) What additional information should we collect? and (3) What additional information can we provide? The instructor summarizes and organizes the class discussion into a list of research questions. For the next assignment, students investigate the research questions. After submission of the research assignment, the class discusses the results of their research during which we decide whether to support or not support the bill and generate a list of talking points. The instructor then prepares a postcard for delivery to representatives in Harrisburg (Figure 1). If time and conditions permit, students solicit (an extra credit assignment) campus community members to sign postcards for delivery to their representatives in Harrisburg. Finally, if conditions permit, an optional trip to Harrisburg is planned by the instructor and interested students. The visit to Harrisburg corresponds with AICUP Advocacy Day to facilitate ease of meeting with representatives. Prior to AICUP Advocacy Day, appointments are made with as many representatives as possible with a focus on the house and senate representatives of students participating in AICUP Advocacy Day and students who signed the postcards. If we didn't have an appointment with a representative, students introduced themselves to the staff and asked to speak with the representative (Figure 2). One of the chambers was in session, so we were not always able to meet with the officials directly. However, in all cases, the students received a warm welcome from the office staff and were able to deliver the postcards and their messages in person. In addition to visiting representatives in the state house and senate, we were able to enter the galleries for both the House and Senate chambers to admire the architecture and furnishings.

Figure 1. Top: Front side of postcard in Spring 2022. Bottom: Reverse side of postcard in Spring 2022.

Figure 2. Top: Photo of students in the Ryan Office Building of the Pennsylvania State Capital Complex in Harrisburg. Bottom: Photo of students meeting with City of Chester State Senator John Kane.

Table 1. Advocacy project timeline.

Semester week	Activity
Week 4 – after exam 1	Introduction to advocacy project (1 class period)
Week 7	Summary of bill due and class discussion and generation of questions
Week 11	Research of questions due and class discussion to generate talking points (1 class period)
Weeks 11–13	Instructor prepares talking points and gets feedback from course (15 min of class time) Students decide if they will participate in visit to Harrisburg Instructor and students meet to prepare for visit Students locate their house & senate representative names and contact information (email and phone) and input into a shared document Instructor coordinates appointments and schedule for visit to Harrisburg
Week 14	Trip to Harrisburg (1 d)
Week 15	Project reflection due

Student reflections

Over the past three years, 104 students have participated in the advocacy project. At the end of the course, students were asked to reflect in essay format on ‘what did you learn from the project?’, ‘any suggestions for next year?’, ‘if you participated in the meeting(s) with representatives, what surprised you the most about the meetings?’, and ‘do you think this is a valuable project for an Organic Chemistry II course? Why or why not?’

The responses to the ‘what did you learn from the project?’ prompt, indicate that the students learned how chemistry, organic chemistry, and green chemistry applied to society and about the process associated with creating a state bill. Thirty-four percent of the students indicated that the project allowed them to apply their green and organic chemistry knowledge. As one student commented, ‘being able to apply our skills to a real-world problem was truly eye opening’. On its own this is a valuable perspective for students to take away from organic chemistry as they routinely do not see the use of organic chemistry outside of pharmaceutical synthesis unless they take a biochemistry course focused on mechanistic biochemistry. A third of the students wrote that the project exposed them to chemistry topics that they had heard about but didn't understand – specifically mentioning fracking and BPA. Thus, the project allows students to apply their knowledge to new topics and allows an instructor to introduce topics typically not covered in the organic chemistry sequence. Thirty-six percent of the students wrote that the project provided an understanding of how chemistry relates to society and that it wasn't just a field involving research in a laboratory. As one student notes, ‘not many lessons show aspects outside the classroom’. Thirty-six percent of the responses indicated that the project informed them about the process of proposing and approving state-level bills. They indicated that they had no prior knowledge that proposed bills were publicly available and that citizens could speak with representatives about their support and concerns of proposed legislation. Given these reflections, I strongly believe that this experience provided students an understanding of how they can be active participants in the political process and advocate for positive change.

The student responses to the value of the assignment (Figure 3) clearly indicated they valued the assignment because it allowed them to see the importance of understanding green chemistry and its impact on our environment and economy and exposed them to possible career paths in politics and environmental law. Ninety-six percent of the students indicated the project had value. Thirty-two percent indicated that the value was related to understanding the importance of green and organic chemistry. Fifty-five percent of the responses indicated that the project provided a real-world application of chemistry.

Figure 3. Word cloud generated from student reflections on the value of the advocacy day project (76).

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Spring 2020 and 2021 classes did not have the opportunity to visit Harrisburg, however, they still indicated they valued the project and were very interested in visiting their representatives in Harrisburg. In Spring 2022, 10 of the 24 students in the class traveled to Harrisburg for AICUP advocacy day. These students indicated (Figure 4) they found the visit interesting and valued the opportunity to meet with representatives. They were also surprised by the respect for their position that most of the representatives displayed, despite their position on the bill.

Figure 4. Word cloud generated from student reflections on the visit to Harrisburg portion of the advocacy day project (76).

Conclusion

Political engagement can be incorporated into a sophomore organic chemistry course by linking an advocacy project with green and sustainable chemistry. This model is broadly applicable to other institutions and courses. As one student commented in their reflection, it ‘would be amazing to see this project being done in some other classes as well’. This project would be valuable in many chemistry courses. All the bills researched could be connected to any general and organic chemistry course by exploring the chemistry and safety of the processes discussed in the bills. The state and federal discussions around renewable energy and climate change lend themselves to topics taught across the chemistry curriculum and the legislatures considering the proposed bills would benefit from hearing the perspectives of young scientists.

Future plans

For future iterations of the project, the advocacy project will begin earlier in the semester (likely within the first two weeks) to provide more time for out-of-class research and an additional class discussion focused on the background chemistry of the bill. The project will likely adopt the 100% renewable energy bill for a few years. This bill was first introduced in 2022 and provides opportunity for the students to build on the research of the spring 2022 course by exploring the chemistry of solar cell recycling, new energy technologies, and other aspects of the bill. This provides the class with the opportunity to provide content-specific advice to representatives and to possibly shape the future of the bill.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the collaborations with Andrea Martin, Widener University Chemistry Department, Angie Corbo, Widener University Communications Studies Department, and Wes Leckrone, Widener University Political Science Department on the Sustainable Chemistry course. These collaborations inspired the project described here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.