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1997
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Chemical Education Today
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Partners in Chemical Education: Proceedings of the International Conference on Industry - Education Initiatives in Chemistry edited by J. N. Lazonby and D. J. Waddington
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reviewed by Hal Harris
Department of Chemistry, University of
Missouri-St. Louis, St. Louis, MO
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June 1997
Vol. 74 No. 6
p. 626
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What is the place of industrial chemistry in the
curriculum? Since virtually every kind of chemistry is used
to produce commercial products, what is the difference
between industrial and any other type? Most of the
chemists that we educate will work in one of the chemical
industries, and the nonmajors in our classes also should
understand some of the practical chemistry that makes possible
the world in which they live. The chemical industry would
like to be respected (or at least not feared) for its essential
role in modern societies. All of these threads met at a
conference at University of York, whose proceedings were
recently published. Every even-numbered year, the IUPAC
sponsors a big International Conference on Chemical Education
that encompasses the whole gamut of issues and
developments in the field. The conference of which this volume is the
Proceedings occurred in late summer, 1995, an off year for
the big conference, and was designed to attract a smaller
audience to a more specific topic. Given the current interest
from both the academic and industrial sides of the subject of
joint efforts, it is not surprising that the organizers at
University of York were able to attract a sizable number of
participants and a page full of industrial donors to what
appears to have been a very successful five-day meeting. The
Proceedings are organized into Plenary Lectures,
Symposia, Workshops, and Poster Papers, but the conference itself
included displays, industrial visits, informal events, and
other activities that could not be captured on paper. The
Plenary Lectures included contributions from both the industry
and academic speakers, as well as three lectures
describing Chemistry and Industry Centers, which are enhanced
science museums that emphasize the role of the chemical
industry. Joost Douma and Astrid van de Graaf
(Prototyping for the 21st Century) described plans for such an
enterprise (IMPULS), to open in April 1997 in Amsterdam. T.
M. Alagiri Swamy Raju briefly summarized India's network
of 50 science centers, describing in more detail the Madras
Science Center where he works. The Chemical Industry
Education Center in York, as described by its Manager,
Miranda Mapletoft, seems to have the most extensive program
integrating the chemical industry into chemistry
classrooms. The Center has been working very closely with the
University of York to produce a number of books and
pamphlets that are cited in her useful bibliography. Michael Pratt
of DuPont Printing and Publishing showed how the
chemistry of lithographic printing can be used to teach.
Fernando Galembeck and Elizabeth Fatima de Souza came from
the Institute of Chemistry of the University of Campinas,
Brazil, to show how physical and chemical principles
essential to the paints and coatings industry also occur in the
chemistry curriculum. More general lectures about
industryeducation cooperation were presented by keynoter
David Giachardi and Ann Hubbard.
While the plenary lectures are published as
coherent essays on a single topic and are fairly readable, the
Proceedings volume fails to do as well in the more difficult task of summarizing the symposia and workshops. It is clear
that the discussions in these sessions were often far-ranging,
and that the assigned correspondents had an impossible
distillation task. The four-page digest of a several-hour
symposium with several speakers cannot possibly be any
more successful than a two-page abridgment of what
happened in a workshop. About 80 pages of poster papers appear
in the Proceedings, and these are quite uneven in their
quality (as they are at most conferences). Some appear to
be complete posters, whereas others are obviously abstracts
of what the authors presented.
There are no references in any of the summaries
of symposia, workshops, or posters. Nevertheless,
chemical educators and industrial chemists looking for ways in
which they can collaborate productively may find some new
ideas in this volume.
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| More Information |
 Citation |
Harris, Hal. J. Chem. Educ. 1997 74 626.
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Keywords |
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History |
Created:
Last Updated: |
July 28, 1999
June 23, 2005
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1997
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June
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