DOI
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.9b00346

Summary
Chemistry education that incorporates systems thinking is renewed because students learn how chemists think and do various tasks in the laboratory and the relationships between chemistry and the larger society. The pedagogical approach developed by SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities) is one approach to reorienting chemistry courses toward a systems perspective and providing increased emphasis on ethical issues. An undergraduate chemistry curriculum that educates “head, hands, and heart” offers great potential to prepare students to become chemists fully committed to the vision of “improving people’s lives through the transforming power of chemistry”.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
It is important to form the new generations of chemists and professionals by developing three distinct dimensions: (1) the cognitive dimension (i.e., the “head”); (2) the skills’ dimension (i.e., the “hand”); (3) the ethical dimension (i.e., the “heart”). This new approach is reasonable if it is accepted that the practice of science and the use of its knowledge should always aim at the welfare of humankind, including the reduction of poverty, be respectful of the dignity and rights of human beings, and of the global environment, and take fully into account our responsibility towards present and future generations.
A new ideal of a more engaged, civic professionalism must take its place. This new professionalism requires systemic approaches and a deep analysis of the linkages between chemical systems and physical, biological, ecological and human systems (the latter include legal and regulatory systems, social and behavioral systems, and economic and political systems.

Point of Strength
There are three pathologies of learning: (1) amnesia, i.e., forgetting by students what they have learned; (2) fantasia, i.e., illusionary understandings or persistent misconceptions that students retain over an extended period of time; (3) inertia, i.e., ideas learned in a way where students are unable to use these ideas in thinking or to apply them to new situations. To fight these learning’s pathologies, it is necessary to reorient chemistry education by presenting concepts and theories with a problem solving’s approach.