Young people expect to be educated about climate change and sustainability (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2021), in order to take an active role in addressing the disproportion of anthropogenic mass to biomass globally and the current imbalance between species on Earth. Traditional educational approaches seldom address connections between disciplines and levels of knowledge, and so new teaching strategies are needed that position students (and their educators) to identify the economic, social and environmental aspects that have impacted the formation of the science that they learn in the classroom. Students are then more able to describe the relationships between these different levels and so realize the interconnectedness of modern society, in order to better understand the complex real-world contexts and critical challenges (such as those related to the United Nations Global Goals for Sustainable Development) that are making their futures uncertain (Gilbert, 2016).

In some ways, this has been recognised by governments worldwide, with mandated curricula being updated to include sustainable development-relevant socio-scientific issues (SSIs), for example in the United States’ Next Generation Science Standards and in the Australian National Curriculum. However, a recent global survey of national curriculum documents from 48 countries in 2020, published in the Learn for our Planet report (UNESCO, 2021) found that less than half of national curriculum documents made mention of climate change explicitly. With respect to chemistry education, this misalignment between curriculum policy and global priorities has been referred to as the “untenable disconnect” (Talanquer et al, 2020, p. 2697) between the type of chemical understanding students learn and the ways that students will need to be able to think and act in order to critically address global challenges.

Over the past few years, chemistry educators have increasingly called for chemistry education to be restructured to incorporate sustainability concepts through a Systems Thinking approach (Mahaffy et al, 2019). Systems thinking, as an educative approach, can be defined as an approach that incorporates the complexity of the whole system (such as a chemical process) in a holistic manner, including intended and unintended consequences (Delaney et al, 2021). Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education (STICE) has been claimed to benefit student learning through developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills (York and Orgill, 2020). Although teachers have shown enthusiasm for STICE, they need to be supported with appropriate professional learning opportunities and resources to be able to adopt STICE methods (Delaney et al, 2021). It needs to be acknowledged as well that any teaching or curriculum innovation needs to fit into an extremely crowded curriculum (Timms et al, 2018). Thus, it is critical to find strategies that teachers can easily use in their classrooms to teach STICE and engage students to explore this way of analysing problems.

This presentation explores the outcomes of a recently implemented systems thinking-oriented professional learning program, through activity responses collected from students and teachers and semi-structured interviews with the teachers. The program supported secondary chemistry teachers to integrate systems thinking and socio-scientific issues such as climate change and sustainable development into their chemistry classroom through a mapping activity (Schultz et al, 2022). One way to support students to integrate new information into their knowledge structures, and to identify and describe the relationships between at-first-glance unrelated aspects of knowledge (such as economic, environmental, social, and human levels) is through a mapping exercise. Here, the purpose of the mapping exercises was to provide opportunities for students to explore and express concepts and connections related to specific chemical or manufacturing processes, as a way to develop their systems thinking capacity.

Since 2020, a year-long externally funded professional learning program has involved supporting secondary school chemistry teachers from different schools to work jointly to carry out a chemistry education research project. In 2020, one such group of teachers (N=5) chose to focus on incorporating systems thinking into their classroom practice, and so implemented their own version of the mapping activity across a diverse range of topics (such as ocean acidification, N95 masks, fertilisers, bioplastics, aluminium) suitable for their own students and own situation (maps drawn by hand or electronically, in-class or during remote learning). These teachers were interviewed towards the end of their year-long involvement and as a 12-month follow-up. Examples of “systems maps” drawn by their students will be shown and described in the presentation. Through the teacher interviews and analysis of the maps, we were interested to consider how the systems-oriented mapping activity of chemical processes engaged students with the development of systems thinking skills. While strict definitions for different types of maps have been proposed, all forms of mapping have a common capacity to display a complex body of knowledge in a two-dimensional format, showing links between related concepts. The “systems maps” generated here, challenged the participant to: include the different components of a chemical process (the reaction sub-system); identify the inputs and the factors (economic, social, scientific, environmental) that contribute to their choice as a useful input for this chemical process; identify the outputs (including waste and by-products), and the intended uses but also unintended consequences of these outputs, in order to describe their impact on other factors; and link individual components on their maps to a UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development number (SDGs 1-17) and state its impact as either being positive or negative towards meeting that SDG. A stated objective of the mapping exercise therefore was to steer students away from seeing a chemical process (and so chemistry) as simply ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, and to through their own illustration demonstrate to them that it is much more complex, and only through better understanding the relationships between parts of the system can we better design the overall system (here a chemical process providing intended products that can positively, or not negatively, impact global society).

A consistent theme observed in teacher interviews was that through the mapping activity they believed their students made better connection to the unintended consequences of chemical processes. One teacher stated, “Often students miss these connections, particularly the unintended uses/consequences/outcomes of materials, and linking it with the SDGs gave it real depth and richness”. In contrast, several teachers perceived that this open-ended task may be unpopular with goal-oriented students because it requires creativity, does not have a single correct answer and may be perceived as taking time away from core content. Also, despite the intention not to increase pressure on time to cover the curriculum, most teachers believed that systems thinking is a skill that still needs to be explicitly taught, rather than as skills-based concepts embedded in a curriculum context. These themes and others will be further explored in the presentation. In conclusion, all teachers agreed that the task of labelling map components as positive/negative influences towards individual SDGs enabled students to better understand the multi-faceted nature of connections between sustainability and what they were learning. We suggest this relatively simple inclusion could be used across science, by educators and researchers alike seeking to infuse sustainable development into the enacted curriculum. It was difficult to quantify the development of systems thinking skills through analysis of student-drawn maps, however, we are reasonably confident that the mapping exercise led students to visualize chemical processes as “systems”, thus developing a systems thinking skill related to identifying and representing components and relationships within the system as well as its boundaries. The maps themselves are representationally rich, offer an alternative to an essay assessment, and could be used for individual or collaborative formative assessment to provide teachers with insights into students’ broader thinking on the connections between chemistry, sustainable development and the global society.

Delaney, S.; Ferguson, J.P.; Schultz, M. (2021). Exploring opportunities to incorporate systems thinking into secondary and tertiary chemistry education through practitioner perspectives. International Journal of Science Education, 43, 2618–2639. doi: 10.1080/09500693.2021.1980631 Gilbert, J. (2016). Transforming Science Education for the Anthropocene—Is It Possible?, Research in Science. Education, 46, 187–201, doi: 10.1007/s11165-015-9498-2 Mahaffy, P. G., Matlin, S. A., Holme, T. A., & MacKellar, J. (2019). Systems thinking for education about the molecular basis of sustainability. Nature Sustainability, 2(5), 362-370. doi: 10.1038/s41893-019-0285-3 Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). (2021). Green shoots: A sustainable chemistry curriculum for a sustainable planet. Retrieved from: https://www.rsc.org/new-perspectives/sustainability/a-sustainable-chemistry-curriculum/ Schultz, M., Chan, D., Eaton, A. C., Ferguson, J. P., Houghton, R., Ramdzan, A., Taylor, O., et al. (2022). Using Systems Maps to Visualize Chemistry Processes: Practitioner and Student Insights. Education Sciences, 12(9), 596. doi: 10.3390/educsci12090596 Talanquer, V., Bucat, R., Tasker, R., & Mahaffy, P. G. (2020). Lessons from a pandemic: Educating for complexity, change, uncertainty, vulnerability, and resilience. Journal of Chemical Education, 97, 2696-2700. doi: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00627 Timms, M.J.; Moyle, K.; Weldon, P.R.; Mitchell, P. (2018). Challenges in STEM Learning in Australian Schools, Policy Insights; Australian Council for Educational Research. Retrieved from: https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=policyinsights UNESCO. (2021). Learn for our planet: A global review of how environmental issues are integrated in education. Retrieved from: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000377362 York, S.; Orgill, M. (2020). ChEMIST Table: A Tool for Designing or Modifying Instruction for a Systems Thinking Approach in Chemistry Education. Journal of Chemical Education, 97, 2114–2129. doi: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.0c00382.