Summary
This paper describes the design, application, and evaluation of a teaching laboratory practice based on a case study related to the citrus biorefinery model, in which first-year undergraduate Chemical Engineering students from a public university in Sao Paulo state (Brazil) obtained essential oil and related coproducts.
The enormous amount of waste generated locally by the citrus processing industry was used as a case study for this guided-inquiry laboratory experiment that addressed concepts found in interfaces with other systems, such as biorefineries, biocircular economies, and green technologies and professional education programs.
The study was developed in the first semester of 2018 during a General Chemistry Laboratory course, with 22 first-year undergraduate Chemical Engineering students. The steam-distillation of essential oils from plant materials, presented in the original curriculum, was modified into a novel, greener method, incorporating the isolation of a second aqueous fraction with additional added-value products and avoiding the use of organic solvents.
Initial and final surveys were distributed to the students to identify previous and acquired concepts related to the chemical content, Green and Sustainable (GC) chemistry and engineering, biorefineries, and the United Nations (UN’s) Sustainable Development Goals, including the importance of such practices in the undergraduate teaching chemistry laboratory. Final reports, mandatory in this course, were also used to evaluate the technical and pedagogical effectiveness of the novel experiment proposed. According to the obtained results and discussions, this redesigned teaching practice focusing on a problem-based local situation allowed students to learn much more than concepts, encompassing procedural and attitudinal content that is important for the critical application of knowledge in the future.
Additionally, a set of green and sustainable chemistry education (GSCE) principles composing a new metric called the Green and Sustainable Chemistry Education Compass Rose was proposed and used for the comparison of the conventional and novel adapted steam extraction experiments. The proposed GSCE Compass Rose as a metric to assess both greenness and GSC education in undergraduate teaching laboratories proved to be a consistent route for visualization and ensured that fundamental conceptual, procedural, and attitudinal content from systemic thinking was incorporated into the teaching and learning processes, which could help deal with the increasing socio-scientific challenges faced by universities and other educational institutions all over the world.
Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
This paper proposes approaches and methodologies to reimagine higher education and deals with systems thinking and sustainability.
The novel pedagogical strategy described was designed through the interconnected nodes of learner systems, chemistry learning and teaching, and earth and societal systems since the very beginning. Therefore, through systems thinking, chemistry education and practice could be integrated in a powerful framework connecting systems via educational tools, such as student-centered learning and local-problem-based learning.
