Hope in Chemistry Education

You will know the story of Pandora. All the evils of the world are bound in a box, and a curious girl wants to see what’s inside. She opens the box and the evils fly out – famine and war, hatred and envy. After they hurtle into the world, all she can do is to shake hope out after them.

I’ve always found the story fascinating. Why is hope in the box of evil things? (Why is it the heaviest thing in the box?) Is this story a warning against being curious or being naïve? 

I want to talk about hope in teaching chemistry. This may seem abstract – even whimsical – at first, but I wonder more and more whether it is one of the most practical problems facing formal Chemistry Education.

This blog post comes after thinking about Kevin Gannon’s Radical Hope: a teaching manifesto for a few years. Gannon’s agenda is broader than this blog post. I admire a lot of what he says about academics and social issues, but don’t have the scope to address it all in this blog. Instead, I will focus on a narrow reading of education as in-class formal instruction.

What is hope?

In formal education, hope grows from the belief that the work we do as teachers boosts the odds of a brighter future. Hope acknowledges that things don’t always work out for the best, but also that people and communities play a significant role in how things happen. Teaching people is a good use of our time because – on balance – educated people help good things to occur: the vehicle for a brighter future is the students we teach.

This register of language is unusual in Chemistry Education. We often focus on the technical aspects of dynamic equilibrium or molecular orbitals, and on the pedagogies appropriate to the logics of these ideas. But teaching is a fundamentally political act because it is about teaching people, and a fundamentally hopeful act because the act of teaching insists that this is all worth doing. Teaching – even teaching chemistry – is an act of political hope.

Any technical account of teaching chemistry is perfectly compatible with this. A future in which my students have grown through learning about equilibrium looks brighter to me. The wheel will turn and someone in a century will be thinking cleverly about the problems they face because I spent an afternoon marking a class’ work about cell potentials. Perhaps I am marking their great-grandmother’s work or their teacher’s teacher’s teacher or the person who founds the company their uncle works for. Maybe their 2125 problem is scientific (like interpreting some data), or maybe it’s personal (like calculating an interest rate). Or it could be something completely unimaginable to me. Hope aims to prepare people to face the challenges life throws at them.

Gannon frames hope in education as a praxis: action informed by theory and critique. Hope is not the compass which points north, it’s the step you take north (or northeast if there’s something in the way). Hope is not the feeling you have, but the thing you do.

Perhaps a way of elaborating this might be to ask what hope’s opposite is. Some people would say that the opposite of hope is despair: rather than a bright future, we see a dark one. This distinction happens inside your head: your perception of the future is the key idea. But hope-as-praxis might contrast hope with inaction. This resonates with me; when I see people lose hope in education they normally become cynical rather than sad. People who lose hope in teaching mostly stop showing up to teaching meetings, or even disrupting them. Hope is about the actions people take.

Posters on Parr Street, Liverpool.

Classrooms of Hope

bell hooks’ observation that the classroom is a rare space of radical possibility seems correct to me. A teacher who is determined to change lives can change lives, and I judge that lying at the bottom of every hopeful interaction in a formal classroom is the ambition to make students better at thinking (here I perhaps differ a little from Gannon, who develops a substantially broader account of how hope can enter a classroom).

What actions might a hopeful classroom contain? Broadly, I judge that hard tasks and thoughtful support are the absolutely necessary components. I think it’s probably also important that the work is meaningful, but meaning could be driven by beauty rather than utility: it can be liberating to learn how to do a reflux condensation, but it can also be liberating to learn about the theory of elegant chemistry which is extravagantly obscure.

Gauging the proper balance between difficulty and support demands a deep understanding of both your subject and your students. Perhaps this can be put more bluntly: it isn’t hopeful to dumb down your subject, and it isn’t hopeful to demand more of your students than they can give. A hopeful teacher takes the people in front of them and helps them to become better at something challenging and worthwhile.

This is so difficult to navigate practically. For example: if your course was designed around students having A Level Maths, but then your admissions criteria stop requiring A Level Maths, you are presented with a tricky situation. You want your students to succeed, but it is unreasonable to expect (some of) them to succeed on the existing course. You want your students to be challenged, but it is clear that (some of) them will not be challenged if you focus the maths on the basics. What do you do?

Pedagogies and Curriculums of Hope

Technical teaching skill can allow us to make more ambitious compromises in these situations. Students can’t solve second-order differential equations yet? Simply teach them how! Teach well enough, and you may not have to cut coverage too aggressively.

Of course there are lots of valid ways of teaching well. While a virtuoso lecturer probably can change lives didactically at scale, for example, it is much harder for most of us. It might be a hopeful act to give a very good didactic lecture, yes, but it might also be hopeful to build in student activity instead. My guess is that active lecturing is normally the more effective – more hopeful – approach.

More broadly, pedagogy is generally a space of compromise and many hopeful pedagogical approaches are very difficult to scale. You want to have a 1:1 conversation with a student about a draft thesis which you have read carefully? This will take a certain number of staff a certain amount of time. You want students to develop a robust grasp of the difference between a base and a nucleophile? You are going to need a thematic lecture where you draw it all together, but there is no room in the timetable. Hope needs personal commitment, but also institutional resourcing; it seems likely that the resources available will never be completely satisfactory.

As I have sat with the idea of hope for a few years, I’ve come to think that compromise is a completely central part of what it means to hope in HE because compromise is the way that something happens rather than nothing. I always see pragmatism in a hopeful teacher: a willingness to engage with the situation honestly, and a determination to make the best of things despite all the negatives. To work out what positive action you can take to help your students grow, and then to do it? I wonder if that’s what hope is, really.

Reaching this view of hope has made me see a lot of colleagues’ behaviours quite differently. I’ve always found it odd that many academics speak so dismissively of students. Complaints about student attitudes, ability, knowledge, and skills have been a staple part of staff meeting discussion in every institution I’ve taught at; while some of it is just venting, I think much of it is more pernicious. More and more, I wonder if looking at this through the lens of hope is a productive reading because those dispiriting contributions are often characterised by the inaction of hopelessness rather than the activity of hope. I wonder if a question like “how can I help this colleague to hope?” is a kind way of moving forward in these situations.

Colleagues’ hope can come into even sharper focus around objects like the curriculum. The coherence of a Chemistry curriculum is so important that academics are required to compromise - often radically compromise - on its shape and size. This takes hope into an interesting space. One academic sees a new maths course as “dumbing down”, but another sees the old maths course as damaging the confidence of students admitted under recent recruitment profiles. One lecturer is thrilled by the scope their specialism has to challenge students, but another sees the value of a rigorous grounding in fundamental theory. One faction thinks student workload is too low and another thinks it is too high. How can everyone sustain their hope in the teaching they do, when any corporate decision will weaken someone’s hope?

I point at this not because I have an answer, but to try and articulate that sometimes the arguments around curriculum are really arguments about hope. There are patterns of curriculum decisions which are capable of damaging colleagues’ hope, and I worry that this aggregated effect is rarely fully considered in curriculum reviews. It must feel dreadful to teach when you don’t really believe teaching is worth doing. Indeed this meaningfulness is directly implicated in burnout, a central threat to academic careers.

Subjects of Hope?

Something I found interesting in Gannon’s book was his excitement about how History had such rich scope for rigorous discussion about social questions. I see a lot of Arts and Humanities subjects being (rightly) very proud of their efforts to broaden students’ view of the world, and confidently explaining that their subjects give citizens the critical thinking skills a society needs. Good for History, I thought, but Chemistry isn’t really like that.

Culturally, Chemistry does not value critical thinking in its undergraduate teaching, instead emphasising “Problem Solving”. This is technically very difficult – we demand a lot of Chemistry students – but when people say things like “the real point of University is to learn how to think critically” I always wince a little. If that’s true, then Chemistry shouldn’t be a University subject (at least not in its current form).

Yet Chemistry has something meaningful to say about so much of the social world. Skin tone is a piece of UV-vis spectrophotometry, the estradiol trans women take is a steroid molecule, the silicon wafers which enable computing are inorganic materials manufactured at scale. I judge that it would be overwhelmingly common for a Chemistry graduate to have all of the technical knowledge they need to understand these systems but exactly no exposure to thinking about them. Sure, maybe skin tone is lowercase-c-chemistry, but it isn’t capital-C-Chemistry. 

There is a question here about how graduates relate to society. I wonder if History’s answer is “by living their lives” and Chemistry’s is “by doing their jobs”. Given the financial investment needed to do science at scale, this might well be hopeful (no-one is going to solve Climate Change without a lab), but I think it does illustrate that hope can look a little different in different subjects. And the clarity of individual growth as an outcome for humanities graduates might be hard to ferry directly into subjects which demand capital investment at such staggering scale.

At the same time, a Chemistry degree is a very general preparation for professional life. Perhaps you can’t think critically as a Chemistry graduate, but someone will pay you enough to work a spreadsheet so that you can start a family. I think that’s hopeful in significant ways, though I also think it’s a different kind of picture to a hope grounded in the Critical Thinking of History. There’s also a lot of space between these two approaches, and I often wonder whether the biggest omission from Chemistry degrees is a critical account of capital-intensive science. Yes we have cured cancer and cleaned drinking water, but we have also withheld cures and built bombs.

The Use and the Burden of Hope

Is hope useful to a teacher? Can someone teach well without believing it’s worthwhile? Holding hope can be difficult – even painful – and the act of building hope is something routinely confounded and frustrated. Doesn’t hope make things harder, sometimes?

Believing in what a student could become is a burden if they don’t believe it themselves and squander their chance to grow. Believing that your lecture is worth doing well is hard if it goes badly. Believing that Chemistry is worth learning is a burden when the specific curriculum doesn't really live up to that belief. Believing that the future can be positively influenced is a burden when climate change and geopolitics are patiently stacking the odds against us. And believing in the political value of teaching can be very lonely if you’re the only person who sees the world this way in your community. Indeed, when institutional under-resourcing cynically relies on staff over-working more to teach well, hope can directly damage a hopeful teacher’s working conditions. Hope can be a heavy thing! I understand why it was at the bottom of Pandora’s box.

And I wonder whether the reason hope was in Pandora’s box in the first place is because imagining a hopeful future is only possible when you realise that the present is so imperfect. It’s tangled in with the bad stuff because it is a response to the bad stuff.

Which is perhaps another way to view the value of hope. It’s only useful in settings which are imperfect, sure, but that’s… most settings. Just as we hope that our teaching will help students respond effectively to the challenges ahead of them, we should probably feel confident that our training has prepared us to respond effectively to the challenges in front of us. Teachers can be active parts of today, as well as excited about tomorrow. Engaging with the questions of our age is one way of being excited about preparing students for the world we’ll leave behind.