DOI
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.9b00387

Summary
This paper suggests that systems-thinking help chemistry education address global challenges, such as those presented by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, via the integration of “the human element” into systems-thinking in chemistry education; namely, via the responsible research and innovation framework.
Authors argue that the “core learning capabilities for systemic change” are (i) seeing and understanding systems; (ii) communicating and collaborating across borders; and (iii) creating desired futures. In addition, together with these three learning capacities is the ability to distinguish between natural and human feedback in coupled human and natural systems. They believe that the responsible research and innovation approach provides a good framework for identifying and acting on the human feedback in these systems. They also demonstrate how this framework could be used effectively to guide the professional development of chemistry teachers.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The paper deals with systems thinking, complex systems, and sustainable development.
Systems thinking includes many different perspectives, theories, and methods. Authors argue that the field of “systems science” has been developed for more than 50 years and has addressed key principles and methodologies that allow systems thinking to be applied across diverse disciplinary domains. The concepts of feedback, system boundaries, and emergent phenomenon are central to systems thinking. Feedback is the act of using a system outcome to modify other aspects of the system. Basic forms of feedback include “reinforcing feedback” (also called positive feedback) in which the system outcome is reinforced, amplifying the behavior of the system, and “balancing feedback” (also called negative feedback), in which the system outcome is reversed, stabilizing the behavior of the system. A system boundary is the separation between the system and environment. A threshold is a limit that, when crossed, can result in system failure. Emergent phenomena are phenomena that emerge from complex systems that cannot be predicted directly from initial conditions. Systems thinking includes the analysis of these concepts. Core skills that systems thinking helps to develop include the ability to understand and interpret complex systems, enhancing the capacity to examine interconnections and relationships between the parts in a system, behavior that changes over time, and how systems-level phenomena emerge from interactions between the system’s parts.
As complex systems are considered systems that cannot be predicted directly from initial conditions, emergent phenomena are considered as key feature of complex systems.
Sustainable development Goals (SDGs) are defined as guidelines for developing human responsibility to address global challenges.

Point of Strength
The strength of the publication is the integration of responsible research and innovation framework to systems thinking.