The second structure is a Pedagogical and Professional-experience Repertoire (PaP-eR) which provides a contextualized example of teacher practice for a given topic through a range of formats, like a syllabus, annotated lesson plan, or stylized interview ( Loughran et al. , 2012 , p. 17). In contrast to the overarching perspective of CoRes, PaP-eRs present a contextualized story of how one teacher approaches the content. These examples help support teacher development because, “in many ways, teachers’ stories actually carry most of the important information that helps other teachers to identify with, and therefore extract their own meaning from, a given description of a teaching and learning situation” ( Loughran et al. , 2012 , p. 16). It might seem counter-intuitive that a more specific example is more easily transferable, but the contextual information of a real class often helps teachers to imagine the content in their own classroom.
After compiling CoRes and PaP-eRs for a given topic, these Resource Folios can then be used in professional development for teachers, providing the common language to move research into practice ( Loughran et al. , 2012 , p. 20). This structure helps prompt teacher reflection on their often-unstated knowledge about teaching certain content. In these types of professional development experiences, “participants required an opportunity to work with a CoRe to develop a familiarity with the process in order to manage the demands inherent in completing the task” ( Loughran et al. , 2012 , p. 217).
There are significant challenges to developing Resource Folios for any content. For many teachers, “in reflecting upon one's own experiences of teaching and learning in science, it can sometimes be difficult to look back and see the changes in practice (and the reasons for those changes) that led to the manner in which one teaches at the present point in time” ( Loughran et al. , 2012 , p. 223). Researchers and facilitators still have a significant role to play in supporting and scaffolding this type of reflection with teachers, working together to construct accurate representations of PCK that can be shared with a wider community.
A group of staff and teachers started the Lead Teacher Program (LTP) in 2016 to help train K-12 educators in principles of green chemistry and empower them to share that expertise with other teachers. The program accepts a small group of two to eight teachers each year for a three-year, stipend position. Throughout this project, there were about 13 teachers in the program at a time across the three years. Within the cohorts, teachers had a wide variety of teaching experience, from new teachers (full time in the classroom for one to three years) to veteran teachers (full time in the classroom for more than twenty years). The teachers also varied in their familiarity with green chemistry, with some teachers having just completed an introductory series of two graduate level courses developed through Beyond Benign or with some teachers who had been heavily involved in green chemistry and resource development prior to their involvement with LTP. Because of these variations, the teachers’ years of involvement in LTP does not necessarily reflect their familiarity with green chemistry education. These teachers participate in a wide variety of activities, which include developing curriculum, presenting webinars, and joining monthly phone calls with other program participants. By working at the K-12 level, LTP seeks to integrate green chemistry principles into early levels of science education. They emphasize the importance of starting at this level to influence higher education, industry, and the whole planet.
To address these questions, the primary author first conducted twenty-eight semi-structured interviews of teachers and staff from LTP after receiving Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval to work with human subjects (project #3028). Informed consent was obtained from each participant before each interview following the approved protocol. All active teachers from two years of the program as well as the majority of former teachers from LTP were interviewed, for a total of twenty-six teachers from a wide variety of public and private schools throughout the US and Canada. Most of these teachers ( n = 18) teach primarily at the secondary-level, and the rest ( n = 8) teach primarily pre-secondary students, including three teachers from the elementary level. The two staff members directly involved with LTP were also interviewed in order to provide their direct programmatic reflections on the program and better shape research conclusions. These population sampling approaches help ensure that our research is reflective of all program perspectives.
As a research team, we transcribed each interview to collect qualitative data from subsequent coding. Each week, we discussed our initial impressions of the interviews as we would transcribe them and started noticing some commonalities amongst them. Once the interviews were transcribed, we were able to begin the qualitative coding process. This process involved assigning pairs (in rotation) to code each interview transcript. We constantly compared coding decisions and ultimately would come to an agreement on which code would fit a certain part of an interview best. If there was uncertainty, it could be brought up in the weekly team meeting to further discuss. This consensus coding process lessened biases and allowed for collaboration as a team. Once the interviews were coded, they were put into NVivo for further sub-coding.
Field notes and content representations.
Additionally, the Resource Folio approach provided another method of investigating teacher's espoused PCK ( Loughran et al. , 2012 ). Before the LTP Summit from July 20–22 of 2020, each teacher was asked to work on a Content Representation (CoRe) worksheet, which prompted them to describe their classroom practices for specific content. See Table 1 for an example CoRe worksheet. This method is designed to make explicit the often implicit knowledge that teachers have about PCK. It provides a common structure and language for teachers to share their teaching expertise with each other and with a wider community. At the Summit, one session was reserved for teachers of similar content areas to talk about their initial CoRe. These conversations and the worksheets helped shape interview questions and later research plans.
To investigate this area of expertise, the interview script asked participants directly to define green chemistry as they understand it in their classroom. Based on interview data, here is our working definition as a synthesis of participants’ descriptions:
Green chemistry is practicing sustainability; it is a healthier, safer, and more cost-effective approach to studying chemistry. It is a lens that allows for the understanding that sustainability at all levels can change our surroundings. As a worldview, it demonstrates the need to shift towards safer production methods, ultimately reducing waste and toxicity in the environment.
Some teachers described green chemistry with a more industrial or manufacturing understanding, such as one participant who said, “green chemistry is a way of making stuff safely and smartly, a way that improves everyone's lives without messing with your own health or negatively impacting others that you don't necessarily think about. It's the safest and smartest way to make stuff to help improve the world.” Many teachers retained some connection with the manufacturing roots of green chemistry and convey that message to students.
Other teachers described green chemistry in terms of the educational benefits it brings, such as “emphasizing that chemistry doesn't need to be taught using things that make explosions, that uses chemicals that have higher risk, whether it's reactivity, flammability, things like that, but it can be done in a safe way and actually… when you use materials that are more benign, kids [ sic ] are typically more familiar with them and can make better connections to the concepts we're trying to teach anyway.” For many teachers, green chemistry necessarily included these types of connections to students’ lives.
The variety of descriptions from these teachers helps form a basis for an educational understanding of green chemistry. This type of description can help support the program goals of empowering and equipping other teachers to implement green chemistry. However, the diverse ways of defining green chemistry also imply a need for making these teachers’ PCK more explicit to share with wider audiences. The CoRe worksheets will be an additional source of data to understand how green chemistry is incorporated to these teachers’ classrooms and share that information more widely.
A large set of justifications covered the educational benefits of green chemistry. Teachers noted many observations from their own classrooms involving student motivation and learning which confirmed their teaching approach. One teacher understood their classroom in this way:
And having made that switch [to be ‘more hands-on’] what a teacher always fears are accidents in the classroom and so you tend to do many demonstrations with students. And of course, if the students don't understand you kind of give them the answer. But having the green chemistry part and having students take ownership of it… it actually opens up a whole spectrum for these students.
This teacher highlighted both the paired benefits of allowing students to be “more hands-on” and to take more “ownership” of their work in the classroom, which allowed students more freedom for inquiry in a lab, pursuing questions that interested them within a safe context as guided by their teacher. Green chemistry is not the only educational approach that includes these types of goals. However, for teachers in LTP, green chemistry seemed to answer many of their wider questions about modern science education, which became a powerful justification for taking that approach.
Another benefit of designing labs to be safer and more environmentally friendly is creating more opportunities within special education. As one teacher said:
But with green chemistry, I think there is a market there where we could target… that's my goal for this year: target special ed. If you have a child who can't behaviorally, academically, physically, or if you have a kid that flails, if you have CP or things like that, and there are body motion issues. If they have issues with that, using the harsh chemicals with the goggles, they may not want to wear them. Just because it's a tactile issue. They may not want gloves on. But we might have replacement labs that they can learn the same skill in a safe manner that maybe the special ed teacher could even do with them, because they don't have to worry about the harsh chemicals.
This teacher brings up an important aspect of green chemistry in education which is inclusivity. Students with disabilities can be more safely taught and involved in hands-on experiences through using green chemistry.
Several teachers spoke passionately about their moral commitment to green chemistry and sustainable science education. As one of them explained:
It's the only way that we can kind of save this planet, and I think that it's exciting for kids. It's empowering for kids, and it's a different way of thinking about things. And we have to change the way we think about things.
These teachers viewed science education as part of their broader commitment to the planet and to their students. For them, green chemistry is a vital tool for addressing environmental issues and, therefore, imperative to prepare “conscious citizens and not just scientists.”
Teachers also explained the benefits of green chemistry to foster life skills that extend beyond their classrooms. Collaboration was a key skill that one teacher highlighted by saying, “We want our students to be scientifically literate once they’re out in the community. But if they can't collaborate well together, that's not going to change anything.” Another teacher extended some of the twelve principles of green chemistry into life skills beyond chemistry, saying:
I had students going on and not only going into chemistry, which I was excited for, but if they were going into any other field, they're taking those skills with them and they’re really branching out and again, utilizing those skills that they're learning, whether it be as simple as waste reduction or toxicity, or you name it, any principle that we're really looking at.
The ethical framework embedded in green chemistry offered these teachers something different than other science curricula. In the interviews, these justifications built upon the motivations to explain why participants stayed involved in LTP and continued using green chemistry principles in their classroom beyond their initial interest.
You don't have to be a chemist to implement green chemistry. [Teachers] don’t have to be teaching chemistry to implement green chemistry. Let's think about the sustainable practices or changing the name slightly so you feel more comfortable with that implementation in the classroom, but outside of more teaching pedagogy and just general outreach to some younger grades or younger teachers as well.
These teachers struggled to decide on the best language for their collective classroom approach, but green chemistry served as a common entry point or hook for all of them.
For these teachers, green chemistry added to and supported their existing approach to science education. One of the teachers gave this definition: “Green chemistry really is chemistry but done in a more thoughtful manner with the health and safety of not just your students but the environment at the forefront.” For some teachers, green chemistry became the predominant lens through which they saw and described their own teaching practice, such as one teacher who said, “Green chemistry can be found in every single unit that I do.” By viewing green chemistry more as sustainability rather than chemistry, the term can reduce the intimidation many K-12 students feel towards chemistry as a subject. Another teacher added that they had been using green chemistry even before using the term, explaining, “as an elementary teacher, I’ve always done sustainable science, and we always do green chemistry. Everything in elementary is kitchen science.” Their efforts to translate this commitment to other teachers seemed to require a reconsideration of their language and led to these distinctions around “sustainability” or “green chemistry” simply as “chemistry.”
A mind map illustrating the overarching outcomes of teaching green chemistry in K-12 classrooms (blue boxes) as developed from interview transcripts. The red boxes reflect common ideas that branch out from these outcomes, while green boxes represent less frequent or more specific topics mentioned in one or more interviews. |
Health and safety were described by many teachers as a way to develop safe and effective solutions to problems in the classroom. With an emphasis on the word “safe,” labs can be designed to foster a safe environment for the instructor and the students. A direct result of this is waste prevention, specifically regarding the labs done in the classroom. A teacher said “green chemistry is not just looking at the immediate effect, it's looking at the long-term effect and how do we make it better and safer for all of us.” It is important to think about the entire chemical processes when it comes to green chemistry in education, not just the end products and cleaning up in response. By teaching green chemistry in the classroom, students can begin to think about the risks that are involved with every decision they make. One teacher described this as “looking at the very beginning of the creation of those molecules all the way through their end of life.” Then asking ourselves, “how can we make things greener and make them so that they have the least amount of impact on the environment and have the lowest risk involved to people?” The goal is to move forward with sustainability enforcing the prevention of harm to human health and the environment.
Through designing and problem solving in the classroom, students learn to think creatively. This requires the use of critical thinking and logic to arrive to the best possible solutions with green chemistry as the basis. One teacher said that “green chemistry is an important way to advance chemistry education by increasing sustainability and also increasing creativity for students.” As a direct result of designing and problem-solving, students can develop a more sustainable mindset. They can also become more thoughtful in the decisions they make both in and outside of the classroom. Teachers say this can further develop with students as they are made aware of the classroom and lab decisions being made behind the scenes. A teacher described an example where students “learn how to read an MSDS sheet because they need to do that in order to evaluate whether they're going to use iron or they're going to use nickel.” The students also “have to figure out which one is the safer option they’re going to use, and which one produces a safer byproduct.” This way of teaching chemistry was described as “the green chemistry way”. For similar reasons, another teacher promotes “students to look at the toxicity as well as different chemicals [they] are using in the classroom.” Rather than designing a safer, more environmentally friendly lab for the students and having them do it, the teachers mentioned involving or explaining to the students the decisions that were made and why.
In addition to students becoming more aware and involved in classroom lab decisions, students can be impacted by green chemistry beyond the classroom setting in both short and long-term ways. They can become more conscious of their daily life decisions beyond their K-12 education, as echoed by one teacher who named the goal of “preparing conscious citizens and not just scientists.”
To accomplish these goals, four case studies are presented below with further commentary developed into a Content Representation (CoRe) for green chemistry in K-12 classrooms. We chose to present these PaP-eRs first to build our grounded theory starting from the classroom experiences of teachers before generalizing an overall CoRe. As Loughran et al. (2012) state:
PaP-eRs bring the CoRe to life and shed new light on the complex nature of PCK. They help create ways to better understand and value the specialist knowledge, skills and ability of teachers thus making that which is so often tacit, explicit for others (p. 25).
These case studies highlight the expertise of four exceptional teachers of green chemistry at the K-12 level.
In one of the interviews, a teacher described a full lesson to illustrate how green chemistry works on different levels between teachers and students to encourage ownership of safety in the classroom.
One of my favorite things to do with Beyond Benign is… a types of reactions lab. Ultimately my curriculum said students have to be able to identify different types of reactions, and they should conduct experimentation with those different reactions… They’re told they have to evaluate both of them using the 12 principles of green chemistry.
So one of those synthesis reactions will maybe be you have to heat things using the Bunsen burner. The other one you don't have to heat it, and so those two reactions they evaluate which one they're going to do, and they have to explain based on the 12 principles, which activity adheres best, or it's either safest or occurs at an ambient temperature, or, you know, whichever one of the 12 principles it hits. Explain why, and then they do that for reaction type one, and then reaction type two, which is a decomposition reaction and then a single displacement. Then a double displacement. So, there are eight potential reactions, and they gotta pick which four they're going to do.
And they do that by researching the toxicity of the chemicals by looking at, you know, the waste products that may be produced by looking at the safety aspect of which ones do I have to use PPE for? Which ones do I only need safety glasses for? Which ones will I need gloves for? And also, which ones you’ve done at ambient temperature? Which ones have to be heated?
And they go through, and they pick the four that they're going to do, and then they justify them, and all of that is done in pre-lab, so that might be done in the period before the lab and then the next day they actually conduct the experiment where they do the four different experiments, they make their observations, they go through, they write the chemical reaction, they balance the chemical reaction, they classify the reaction.
So that is them meeting the curriculum expectations. But the pre-work is where they actually had to evaluate the safety of the molecules, of materials, safety of the process as well as the waste stream. That's the green chemistry part. That's the sustainability piece, that's where the Lead Teacher Program leads them through. So where in my class students have to evaluate which reaction they do, another class in another school the teacher might prescribe them the four reactions, but those four reactions may not have even been the four safe ones, and even if they were the safe ones, that's the teacher doing green chemistry, not the students doing the green chemistry.
If the teacher does the green chemistry. That's good. You save the materials you save the cost, you are doing it safe for the students, but the students aren't getting the opportunity to evaluate the different procedures, and so that's where that topic goes from being just a very cursory cookbook lesson: mix these chemicals, write the reactions… which still they should hit the expectation.
But by doing it the green chemistry way, by doing it through the lesson plan developed through the Lead Teacher Program, then you actually have students being thoughtful about choosing them. They learn how to read an MSDS sheet because they need to do that in order to evaluate whether they're going to use iron or they're going to use nickel. And they have to figure out which one is the safer options they’re going to use and which one produces a more safe byproduct.
This teacher integrated an understanding of green chemistry that includes teachers making design decisions for their students while also enabling their students to consider chemical safety throughout a lab. This approach to safety represents the first component of PCK from Magnusson et al. (1999) : “orientations toward science teaching.” For this teacher, science education involves students actively in the process of planning and carrying out investigations safely.
As exemplified in this case study, a green chemistry approach enables teachers to make decisions that minimize risks and include students actively in the safety process with appropriate levels of support. Students’ understandings and abilities differ across grade levels, but even younger students can be guided to think through potential chemical or physical risks involved in an experiment. Therefore, green chemistry is not only a behind-the-scenes method for teachers. It can also support a direct approach to involve students in planning and carrying out investigations.
The teacher first reminded students that they had previously talked about green chemistry. As a reminder, he summarized three “criteria” of green chemistry: materials that are safer to make and clean, just as effective, and, on an industrial level, cheaper. He then told the students that they would be making a green glue, which refers “not to the color” but to it being “made of household chemicals.” As further emphasis, he added that “you could eat it. It would taste nasty, but it wouldn’t hurt you.” Finally, he noted that other glues can contain many harmful chemicals, in contrast to the green glue which the students will make.
Throughout the procedure, the teacher guided students to work in pairs by talking through each step. First, he asked them to pick up materials from lab benches including baking soda, vinegar, and powdered milk which were already measured out into plastic cups. Then he had students label the cups on their own, noting that they can easily “find the vinegar with your nose, even with a mask on.” He reminded them of several safety rules when they are in the lab like being aware of the space around them and cleaning up any spills immediately. Next, he had them begin adding ingredients together. The teacher brought hot water to each table to mix in with the powdered milk and dissolve it. Then students needed to add the vinegar to the milk and mix until a curd formed, which they removed and put on a paper towel. The teacher collected the remaining liquid whey. Then students broke up the curd with a fork in the plastic cup and added some hot water as needed. Finally, they added some pinches of baking soda to neutralize the remaining solution and finish their green glue.
After finishing the procedure and cleaning up briefly, the teacher returned to the green chemistry criteria to decide if this glue fit. He emphasized that the materials were safer going in, since the students did not wear aprons or goggles, and going out, since they are able to pour everything down the drain at the end. He connected the importance of waste that goes down the drain because it can impact well water and aquifers in the local area. Then he suggested that they could calculate how cost-effective the glue was by adding up the ingredients. Finally, he asked: “does it work?” He continued by saying, “If it's not effective, then there's no point in doing it.” So, he suggested that students use their green glue to create a collage out of torn up construction paper in the last ten minutes of class. Then they could check the next day to see how their glue worked. Several students were proud to show me their collages as they finished.
Overall, this lesson exemplifies the second component of PCK from Magnusson et al. (1999) : “knowledge and beliefs about science curriculum.” For elementary students, making glue from ingredients that they knew was an experience of green chemistry as a creative activity. The curriculum for this lesson and this teacher's specific approach guided students through the process safely and effectively. Students of any age being able to hold something in their hands that they helped make is an empowering tool for learning. These students might not be able to restate the three criteria of green chemistry, but they could certainly show off the collages they created and know they had a hands-on role in creating something useful.
In one of the classroom observations for a high school chemistry class, the teacher introduced the twelve principles as part of a unit on plastics. This case study provides an annotated outline of the principles as presented in this class, including the examples the teacher used for each, to provide a basis for other teachers to consider how or if they can integrate the principles directly ( Table 2 ).
Green chemistry principle | Formal description and teacher connections |
---|---|
1. Waste prevention | Formal description: prioritize the prevention of waste, rather than cleaning up and treating waste after it has been created. Plan ahead to minimize waste at every step. |
Simplified description: “Whenever you’re doing a chemical reaction, it ends up producing some waste… maybe not everything you have in that reaction actually gets used, so the whole point is to limit that waste.” | |
2. Atom economy | Formal description: reduce waste at the molecular level by maximizing the number of atoms from all reagents that are incorporated into the final product. Use atom economy to evaluate efficiency. |
Simplified description: “Whatever atoms you start with and put into the reaction should be what you’re taking out of the reaction.” | |
Connection to previous material: “If we remember working with our molymods [molecular modeling kits], we were making all of those different chemicals. We added a bunch of chemicals together, and those atoms are what ended up in our product… Basically: do you have atoms that are hanging out, or are they all present in your products?” | |
3. Less hazardous chemical synthesis | Formal description: design chemical reactions and synthetic routes to be as safe as possible. Consider the hazards of all substances during the reaction including waste. |
Simplified description: “Basically that means that we’re designing safe reactions.” | |
Real-life examples: “If I’m talking about a safe reaction, what are we not going to be doing during a safe reaction? What would that not look like?… We wouldn’t be lighting things on fire. We wouldn’t be causing things to explode… This actually happened to me when I was in undergraduate. I was working in a research lab, and someone was working with a reaction that was very sensitive to water. And they actually ended up having a bunch of glassware explode on them that day… They were doing everything correct; it was just humid that day.” | |
4. Designing safer chemicals | Formal description: minimize toxicity directly by molecular design. Predict and evaluate aspects such as physical properties, toxicity, and environmental fate throughout the design process. |
Simplified description: “This is going more into the toxicity of it. So how toxic is that chemical compared to others?” | |
Real-life examples: “A big area you can kind of think about designing safer chemicals are actually with your skincare and healthcare products. So are there any skin or healthcare things that you try to avoid?… Botox might be one of them. That's quite literally putting something poisonous in it so that it freezes that area… Lead, yeah, so pencils are now made of graphite, so we’re not ingesting a lot of lead… Asbestos, that is pretty common with a lot of household materials.” | |
5. Safe solvents and auxiliaries | Formal description: choose the safest solvent available for any step. Minimize the total amount of solvents and auxiliary substances used, as these make up a large percentage of the total waste created. |
Real-life examples: “This one is a little bit tricky to understand… One of the safest solvents you can actually use is water. Water is a nice, safe solvent that we use in most chemical reactions to mix a lot of those powders and things.” | |
6. Designed for energy and efficiency | Formal description: choose the least energy-invasive chemical route. Avoid heating and cooling, as well as pressurized and vacuum conditions (i.e., ambient temperature and pressure are optimal). |
Real-life examples: “What would it look like to not be energy-efficient? If we’re not energy-efficient, what are we using?… Fossil fuels, yeah, so that's going into more the renewability of it. But in terms of energy, maybe we’re using fossil fuels to power up a gas generator that we’re pulling energy from. Anytime you have to heat up a reaction, you’re using electricity. That is not energy efficient. Anytime you have to cool it down. Anytime you have to add pressure to it. All of those situations require energy that you don’t need. If you could do a reaction just on your tabletop without doing anything, that is a nice, energy-efficient reaction.” | |
7. Use of renewable feedstock | Formal description: use of chemicals which are made from renewable (i.e., plant based) sources, rather than other, equivalent chemicals originating from petrochemical sources. |
Real-life examples: “That's basically anything that's not oil-based, so like corn, potato, tapioca. All of those feedstocks we can grow again and again, so those are all considered renewable resources.” | |
8. Reduce derivatives | Formal description: minimize the use of temporary derivatives such as protecting groups. Avoid derivatives to reduce reactive steps, resources required, and waste created. |
Simplified description: “We’re trying to minimize how many side products that get made.” | |
Connection to previous material: “A lot of the time, the way that I’ve taught you a reaction,” teacher says while drawing an example reaction on the board, “is you start with your reactants, and all of that goes together to make your product. In real life, that's not what happens. You get some side products. You get a whole lot of different things happening. Maybe you get like part of A mixed with part of B. So you might be able to get a lot of derivatives from that reaction, and this is all about how efficient your reaction is. The whole goal is that you don’t get a lot of these derivatives.” | |
9. Catalysis | Formal description: use catalytic instead of stoichiometric reagents in reactions. Choose catalysts to help increase selectivity, minimize waste, and reduce reaction times and energy demands. |
Simplified description: “We’re using a catalyst to help speed up that reaction, and it also reduces waste and reduces the reaction time. Basically, we’re speeding it up.” | |
Real-life example: “What is a catalyst that got you to school today?… Your car, okay, so your car got you to school. Is your car getting the education it needs right now? No, so your car helped get you here. It got you here quicker so that you can learn and then you can go home. That is like a catalyst. It's not part of the reaction. It's not part of your learning, but it's helping you make that learning possible.” | |
10. Design for degradation | Formal description: design chemicals that degrade and can be discarded easily. Ensure that both chemicals and their degradation products are not toxic, bio accumulative, or environmentally persistent. |
Simplified description: “That basically means: can it degrade and dissolve in whatever material? Is it going to break down and not just make a little microplastic? Ideally when it degrades, it degrades into things that are not toxic, because a lot of times things degrade into things that are toxic. So how can we prevent that toxicity?” | |
11. Real-time prevention | Formal description: monitor chemical reactions in real-time as they occur to prevent the formation and release of potentially hazardous and polluting substances. |
Simplified description: “That's all about preventing hazardous pollutants. That one's pretty self-explanatory.” | |
12. Safer chemistry for accident prevention | Formal description: choose and develop chemical procedures that are safer and inherently minimize the risk of accidents. Know the possible risks and assess them beforehand. |
Simplified description: “You don’t want to have accidents, especially if we want to bring this to a mass scale. So that's really taking in all of the risk factors and seeing ‘are those risk factors going to affect us?’” |
In the first part of this observation, the class watched videos about recycling and ocean plastic clean-up as initial context to motivate the lesson. The teacher then asked students to consider examples, benefits, and drawbacks of plastics from their experience. To introduce green chemistry, the teacher explained that creating a biodegradable plastic would be one solution to the recycling issues. She gave a brief history of the development of green chemistry and stated this initial definition: “green chemistry is the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use or generation of hazardous substances.” Then students were asked to match up formal descriptions of each of the twelve principles with the titles, as shown below. They had time in pairs to work on that matching exercise on their computers. After about ten minutes, the teacher went through each principle and gave examples or annotations to make the ideas more relatable to the students. Connections to previous material, simplified descriptions, and real-life examples were used for different principles to explain them more fully. The examples serve as initial entry points and providing them here can allow teachers to consider their own examples or descriptions more easily.
These initial examples were intended as an overview of the principles before continuing the unit on plastics where the students would apply the principles more directly. After these examples, the teacher also acknowledged that “if you didn’t get all of these, that's okay. A lot of these definitions are very technical. We’re going to continue working with these throughout the year as we’re learning these different principles.” Finally, the teacher assigned one principle each to pairs of students for them to explore more deeply by watching a video and answering a series of prompts. In subsequent days of this unit, students created their own plastics based on polylactic acid with a variety of starting materials and additives.
Overall, this case study helps to address one of the central issues of green chemistry education at the K-12 level, which is how to adapt a system that was developed for an industrial and research context into educationally appropriate and valuable content. Teachers often adapt green chemistry by providing examples that make sense developmentally and culturally to their students. The expertise needed to make these kinds of connections was one of the main ways that PCK was initially described by Shulman (1986, p. 9) . This expertise will necessarily differ at other levels of education like in university classrooms ( Grieger et al. , 2022 ). This classroom provides just one glimpse into that process from a high school teacher's perspective.
The supplemental examples that teachers used for green chemistry represent another subset of expertise that varies depending on local context and how familiar the teacher is with the material. Knowing appropriate examples would fit into the third component of PCK from Magnusson et al. (1999) : “knowledge and beliefs about students’ understanding of specific science topics.” Naturally these examples would differ based on classrooms, local regions, cultural background of students, and age range. These types of connections are similar to the approach of place-based education ( Sobel, 2013 ), and they help to capture the PCK that teachers develop for their individual classrooms.
The teacher's role in this classroom was largely to propose questions for the students and ask them to explain their reasoning or to give evidence for their conclusions, a method heavily reflective of the NGSS Lead States (2013) . The types of questions varied based on the abilities of the students and where they were in the experiment. At one point, the teacher warned a student to think through their experiment thoroughly, saying, “I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions before you finish, so make sure you understand.” In fact, questions were the vast majority of ways that the teacher spoke with students and provide insight into how this teacher views the experimental process.
Some of the questions that the teacher asked included:
(1) “What are you going to do? How are you going to do that?”
(2) “Is this making sense?”
(3) “What is a rule of good chemistry? What is important to remember when you are doing chemistry?”
(4) “What do you mean by ‘precautions?’ What would be an example of a safety precaution?”
(5) “How will you be safe? What kinds of things will you do to stay safe?”
(6) “What are you going to do next? You get to decide.”
(7) “What are you doing for your second iteration?”
(8) “What did we learn?”
(9) “How is [the soap] going to take away the germs? And how is homemade soap different from other types, like Dove?”
(10) “What scents are you using [for your soap]? What additives are you using? What are you putting in yours?”
(11) “What did you notice about the pictures you took before and after washing your hands?”
(12) “Other groups had pictures that looked like this, but yours looked like that. Why do you think that is?”
The teacher rarely gave direct answers or instructions to students and instead focused on prompting their own reflection on the experiment and their conclusions. At times, the teacher gave advice to students about the experimental procedure to limit the range of options, such as adding essential oils one drop at a time. The procedural scaffolding supported students to focus on the scientific process of investigation and explaining their reasoning.
Because of the inherent safety of green chemistry, this teacher was better able to construct the classroom in a way that supported this type of open and self-paced inquiry. This approach exemplifies the fourth component of PCK from Magnusson et al. (1999) : “knowledge and beliefs about assessment in science.” Verbal assessments gave this teacher direct information about students’ understanding in addition to the written assignments included in the unit. For a green chemistry approach that can tend to be more variable and student-directed, this type of assessment works well. Labs and activities are built around scientific explanations more than accurate results or correct answers. Green chemistry does not require this assessment approach, but it does allow for significant flexibility and explicit scaffolding from the twelve principles to enable students to test and defend their ideas safely and thoughtfully.
The CoRe outlines some of the aspects of PCK “most attached to that content,” but it is not the only representation. It is a necessary, but incomplete, generalization that helps to make the complexity accessible and manageable; it is neither complete nor absolute (p. 25).
The descriptions in Table 3 explain the main components of this CoRe connected with the relevant components of PCK from Magnusson et al. (1999) : (1) orientations toward science teaching, (2) knowledge and beliefs about science curriculum, (3) knowledge and beliefs about students’ understanding of specific science topics, (4) knowledge and beliefs about assessment in science, and (5) knowledge and beliefs about instructional strategies for teaching science (p. 97).
CoRe area | Description | Relevant PCK components(s) from (1999) |
---|---|---|
Chemical safety | Green chemistry is inherently safer, smaller scale, and more cost effective compared to traditional curricula. It encourages teacher and student ownership of chemical safety throughout the classroom. | 1 |
Practice of chemistry | Green chemistry provides an empowering experience of making and using chemicals, helping students to imagine creative possibilities of the future. | 1, 2 |
Teacher-facilitated connections | Teachers support their students’ engagement with green chemistry by making connections with industrial, community-based, or real-life examples. | 3, 5 |
Experimentation mindset | Green chemistry supports classrooms to be exploratory, design-oriented, and based in problems and solutions. Students are supported to make claims and cite evidence to support their conclusions. | 4, 5 |
The four CoRe areas reflect the four case studies above but are generalized to be applicable to more classrooms. Overall, the CoRe summarizes the expertise of teachers in LTP beyond traditional chemistry content and classroom management strategies. These four areas speak to the unique contribution that green chemistry makes to K-12 science education and can serve as a basis for further reflection and development by teachers and researchers. Some of the areas overlap, but each one highlights an emphasis that green chemistry brings compared to more traditional chemistry curricula.
First, green chemistry makes chemical safety more explicit for teachers and students. By using less hazardous chemicals and smaller scales, experiments are inherently safer for students and for the environment. Everyone in the classroom can take ownership for safety through open conversations and applying the twelve principles to their experiments. Teachers who choose to incorporate green chemistry view learning as a shared process with students in their classroom. An added benefit of chemical safety also includes cost savings from materials, waste disposal, and addressing risks of injuries.
Second, green chemistry supports an empowering experience of chemistry as a creative science of solutions. K-12 green chemistry curricula should be designed to encourage engagement with this practice of chemistry rather than simply a science of following procedures. Through green chemistry, teachers and students can develop a perspective of science that is capable of confronting future issues in ways that protect people and the planet.
Third, green chemistry requires teachers to develop a wide range of connections to real-life and their local region in order to connect students with the content. A contextual approach to chemistry engages students and motivates their learning far beyond the classroom. Simplified descriptions and connections to previous material also serve to weave green chemistry into existing curricula.
Finally, green chemistry includes an experimentation mindset where students are assessed based on their ability to cite evidence from experience to justify their claims. These classrooms are exploratory, design-oriented, and based in finding solutions to real world problems. Both instruction and assessment must be adapted to this type of environment.
Conclusions, implications for k-12 green chemistry education.
The value of teaching green chemistry to K-12 students was also very prevalent throughout this research. There are many benefits for the students to learn green chemistry regardless of their intent to pursue a science education or not. Teachers described using green chemistry to engage their students and develop a sustainable mindset. Students can think about the consequences of their daily life decisions and how they can impact human health and the environment.
Teachers often highlighted the idea that all chemistry should be seen through the lens of green chemistry. However, from a research standpoint, they are separate for a reason ( MacKellar et al. , 2020 ). Yes, it is beneficial for educators to teach chemistry through a green chemistry lens across many topics. However, the point of green chemistry is ultimately to make our current and new chemistry practices safer for the environment and human health ( Mahaffy et al. , 2019 ). If all chemistry was green chemistry, chemists may be less likely to use this sustainable mindset in re-evaluating current practices or in designing new ones.
One important take-away from this research is the need for more K-12 green chemistry resources. K-12 teachers have difficulty integrating the twelve principles of green chemistry directly because they are not as applicable to the curriculum of younger students ( Ause, 2018 ). However, given the demands of their job and work-load as teachers, the green chemistry educational community could benefit from having access to more resources to allow greater integration of green chemistry in their classrooms.
A critical component of any educational program is its effects on students in the short and long term. With a more well-defined foundation for green chemistry in K-12 classrooms, further work will be needed to study how this approach affects student learning ( Bransford et al. , 1999 ; Grieger et al. , 2022 ). With a basis for defining PCK for green chemistry, connections could be investigated more thoroughly between teachers’ levels of expertise and student outcomes ( Coe et al. , 2014 ). Future studies can consider the longer term impact of learning about green chemistry for students in later university classes or careers in industry. These types of connections would be critical to advancing green chemistry education.
Finally, we return to the purpose for this project. The future cultivation of teacher expertise in the current landscape of green chemistry can benefit from the results and discussion covered here. Developing pedagogical content knowledge among K-12 teachers in the Lead Teacher Program has served to advance to prominence and understanding of green chemistry. And if continued to be developed in ways that are sustainable for participants and staff, LTP and other work by Beyond Benign can continue to bear fruit for many years to come.
What is needed is a green approach to K-12 education that more directly supports exceptional teaching and learning. The Pedagogical Content Knowledge developed with teachers in LTP through this project can act as a catalyst to provide alternate kinetic patterns and help teachers to identify the most sustainable and productive educational pathways for their own classroom. The approach of green chemistry more broadly can act as a renewable energy source to drive the reaction thermodynamically. Together, the knowledge and practices explored in this project can make exceptional chemistry teaching more sustainable and attainable for K-12 teachers. As one Lead Teacher shared, that vision will truly be “something that's valuable to humankind at the end of the day.”
The Berkeley Haas Case Series is a collection of business case studies created by UC Berkeley faculty
Learning objectives.
Pub Date: Jun 30, 2016
Revision Date: Jul 15, 2016
Discipline: Operations Management
Subjects: Manufacturing, Collaboration, Social responsibility, Sustainability, Supply chain management, Green business
Product #: B5867-PDF-ENG
Industry: Chemicals, Apparel, Manufacturing
Geography: United States, Asia, Europe
Length: 21 page(s)
A new collection of business case studies from Berkeley Haas
The aim of the Berkeley Haas Case Series is to incite business innovation by clarifying disruptive trends and questioning the status quo.
Breadcrumbs Section. Click here to navigate to respective pages.
Scalable Green Chemistry
DOI link for Scalable Green Chemistry
Packed with real-world examples, this book illustrates the 12 principles of green chemistry. These diverse case studies demonstrate to scientists and students that beyond the theory, the challenges of green chemistry in pharmaceutical discovery and development remain an ongoing endeavor. By informing and welcoming additional practitioners to this m
Chapter 1 | 24 pages, introduction to green pharmaceutical science: fact, fiction, and future, chapter 2 | 18 pages, green chemistry in drug development, chapter 3 | 32 pages, development of green-by-design, practical biocatalytic processes, chapter 4 | 30 pages, application of green metrics to scalable industrial synthesis plans: approaches to oseltamivir phosphate (tamiflu r© ), chapter 5 | 36 pages, the road to becoming green: process development of ar-a2, an active pharmaceutical ingredient with, chapter 6 | 16 pages, improved and greener process for pioglitazone and its pharmaceutically acceptable salts and lokeswara rao madivada, chapter 7 | 10 pages, the development of a convergent green synthesis of linezolid, an oxazolidinone antibacterial agent, chapter 8 | 18 pages, development of a nonaqueous process for the synthesis of amino-pentan-1,5-diol, chapter 9 | 22 pages, development of a robust, environmentally responsible process for the manufacture of tofacitinib citrate, chapter 10 | 28 pages, selective nitration under cgmp conditions, chapter 11 | 66 pages, going green using combined real-time analytics and process automation, chapter 12 | 38 pages, approaches to the scale-up of organic chemistry using microwave heating, chapter 13 | 18 pages, challenges faced and future directions.
Connect with us
Registered in England & Wales No. 3099067 5 Howick Place | London | SW1P 1WG © 2024 Informa UK Limited
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
Green chemistry as a discipline is gaining increasing attention globally, with environmentally conscious students keen to learn how they can contribute to a safer and more sustainable world. Many universities now offer courses or modules specifically on green chemistry - Green Chemistry: Principles and Case Studies is an essential learning ...
Five technologies that have succeeded in meeting that creative challenge have received 2017 Green Chemistry Challenge Awards. Merck, Dow Chemical, Koehler, Amgen, Bachem, UniEnergy Technologies ...
Case Studies. Selected case studies illustrate how the Green Chemistry approach can be applied in different companies and how it contributes to reduce the consumption of hazardous chemicals and enhance their economic and environmental performance. green chemistry, green chemistry toolkit, green chemistry toolkit UN, green chem, current research ...
solving case studies lend themselves very e ffectively to the teaching of green chemistry. Two examples of this approach have previously been published elsewhere 9, 10 . A Case Study in Green ...
In 1998, Paul Anastas and John C. Warner published a seminal book, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice, which established the 12 Principles of Green Chemistry as the foundation for this dramatic shift in the way we do chemistry. 1 The 12 Principles fall into three general categories: (1) use and produce no toxic chemicals, (2) minimize the use of chemical and energy resources, and (3) prevent ...
Table 1 Selected case studies of green chemistry efforts advancing environmental justice in the areas of toxicity, renewability, degradability and circularity. Full size table.
CASE STuDIES. Green Chemistry: A Strong Driver of innovAtion, growth, AnD BuSineSS opportunity 39 Apple's Green chemistry leadership role Apple has three priorities when it comes to sustainability: climate change, resources (i.e., finite resources), and smarter chemistry. The last one is a big priority, but so is the goal of becoming
Table 1 | Selected case studies of green chemistry efforts advancing environmental justice in the areas of toxicity, renewability, degradability and circularity Conventional chemistry
The 12 Principles of Green Chemistry act as a guide for chemists for the design and synthesis of sustainable products. Adoption by chemists is essential for the transition. We chose the use of solvents (Principle #3) as an example of our commitment towards improved sustainabilty in chemical synthesis. Herein Green Chemistry Reviews Sustainable Laboratories
Green chemistry is the chemistry for "pollution prevention.". Green chemistry is a step toward the sustainable delivery of services and goods to growing population without compromising environmental quality. According to an estimate by United Nations, the world population will cross 10.7 billion by 2050.
The 12 Principles of Green Chemistry act as a guide for chemists for the design and synthesis of sustainable products. Adoption by chemists is essential for the transition. We chose the use of solvents (Principle #3) as an example of our commitment towards improved sustainabilty in chemical synthesis. Herein Green Chemistry Reviews Sustainable Laboratories
Systems thinking also helps one to manage the complexity that is inherent to sustainability and the implementation of green and sustainable chemistry (Constable, et al., 2019).Figure 1 shows a systems-level view of chemical evaluation. An important point to be made about thinking in systems within the chemistry context is that this should be accompanied by life cycle thinking, i.e., a ...
Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge 2020. 447 pp., softcover, € 78.00.—ISBN 978-1-78801-798-5 Skip to Article Content ... Green Chemistry: Principles and Case Studies. By Felicia A. Etzkorn. Roger A. Sheldon, Roger A. Sheldon. Molecular Sciences Institute, School of Chemistry, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa ...
Green Chemistry is expanding its wings from academic laboratories to industrial units. Sustainable practices include replacement of volatile organic solvents which constitute the bulk of a reaction material, developing recyclable catalysts, developing energy efficient synthesis and encouraging the use of renewable starting material. By following the principles of green chemistry, turn-over of ...
Green Chemistry Principle # 12 is known as the "Safety Principle". It may be the most overlooked of the twelve principles, yet it is the logical outcome of many of the other principles. In fact, it is practically impossible to achieve the goals of Principle 12 without the implementation of at least one of the others.
As an illustrative example, we demonstrate the process of hacking a case related to Green Chemistry in the pharmaceutical industry, highlighting specific challenges for chemistry and chemical engineering education. ... A complex case: using the case study method to explore uncertainty and ambiguity in undergraduate business education. Teach ...
A case study in green chemistry: ... We hope that our example on transitioning and shifting mindsets towards a complete adoption of green chemistry principles will inspire others as well. A two-year collective effort towards the reduction by 50% of the usage of 7 hazardous solvents (Green Chemistry Principle #5) within a large-scale industrial ...
Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge 2020. 447 pp., softcover, € 78.00.—ISBN 978‐1‐78801‐798‐5 Skip to Article Content ... Green Chemistry: Principles and Case Studies. By Felicia A. Etzkorn. Roger A. Sheldon. Molecular Sciences Institute, School of Chemistry, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa ...
Introduction Green chemistry education: from industrial principles to educational values Green chemistry originally developed from an industrial perspective and includes twelve principles to conceptualize and use chemicals in a more sustainable way (Anastas and Warner, 1998; Anastas and Eghbali, 2010).A list of the twelve principles is featured in Table 2 along with a classroom case study.
Green chemistry as a discipline is gaining increasing attention globally, with environmentally conscious students keen to learn how they can contribute to a safer and more sustainable world. Many universities now offer courses or modules specifically on green chemistry - Green Chemistry: Principles and Case Studies is an essential learning resource for those interested in mastering the subject.
This case examines the challenges and opportunities faced by Levi Strauss & Co. (LS&Co.) as it attempts to help establish a cross-industry sustainability initiative to eliminate hazardous chemicals in the apparel supply chain. LS&Co.'s Screened Chemistry Program screened chemical formulations against human and environmental health hazard endpoints before they chemicals entered the supply chain ...
Packed with real-world examples, this book illustrates the 12 principles of green chemistry. These diverse case studies demonstrate to scientists and students that beyond the theory, the challenges of green chemistry in pharmaceutical discovery and development remain an ongoing endeavor. By informing and welcoming additional practitioners to this m
Lesson Plan 13: Real-World Cases in Green Chemistry. PowerPoint Presentation 13: Real-World Cases in Green Chemistry ... PGCCA Case Studies: 2016: Newlight Technologies, AirCarbon: Greenhouse Gas Transformed into High-Performance Thermoplastic. 2012: Buckman International, Inc.: Enzymes Reduce the Energy and Wood Fiber Required to Manufacture ...
Description. Green Chemistry in Practice: Greener Material and Chemical Innovation Through Collaboration collects a unique set of case studies based on researchers' experiences in developing practical, green chemistry-driven solutions to industry problems as part of the Greener Solutions Program at the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry.