1. Chemistry Literacy Learning about Chemistry for informed citizenship
Chemistry and everyday life
Chemistry reports on the media and in public decision
Chemistry and technology
Chemistry and society
Learning about Chemistry as a cultural force
Nature of Chemistry, its norms and methods
Key theories, concepts and models of Chemistry
Chemistry-based technologies

2. Chemistry Education and Research
All aspects of chemical education should be clearly associated to research:
Research in Chemistry
Research concerning Education in Chemistry at all levels:
primary and secondary schools/ college/ University
- Science and technology/books/TV/citizenship

3. Chemistry education and everyday life chemistry
When high school students do not know simple things about the world around them, such as the composition of air, what happens when something burns or decomposes, or the difference between dissolving and melting, but do know the particles that make up the atom, and how to write electronic configurations, there is something amiss in chemistry education.

4. Students need to connect phenomena with the particulate nature of matter and the symbols representing the particles in order to truly understand not only chemistry but also the role of models in science and the nature of science.
Understanding: a dynamical epistemological status conferred on individuals by a consensually recognised referent group within a community of scholars, based on criteria of intersubjectivity, parsimony, coherence, and conceptual transparency.

5. Mindful teaching Are established meanings being used by the students?
Is the teaching approach as simple as practical?
Is that approach internally consistent?
Can it whitstand critical analysis?
Can it yield external, community-based, less-subjective indicators of student progress?

6. Mindful learning
learning in ways that will make what we have learned more broadly transferable to new situations and thus continue to be useful both in meeting life’s challenges and for further learning.
learning by multiple approaches in varied context and from varied perspectives
‘The context of how we learn something is as important as what we learn’
‘Learning is a change in the meaning of experience’

7. Phenomena
(Macroscopic level)a
Interpretation, Model
(Microscopic level)
Representation
(Symbolic level)

8. Philosophy of Chemistry
Teaching and learning of Chemistry can be improved through an understanding of the structure of chemical knowledge?
There is a specific-domain chemical knowledge?
1994 – First International Conference on Philosophy of Chemistry

9. Reductionism:
Chemistry can be ontologically reduced to physics?
Nature of laws in Chemistry
Forms of explanation of Chemistry
Supervenience:
The relation between macroscopic properties and microscopic components
Is an hystorical approach useful for teaching Chemistry?

10. Reductionism Ontological reductionism Epistemological reductionism
While we do not dispute the ontological reducibility of chemistry to physics, we do argue that the reductionist framework has distorted epistemological distinctions across branches of science, thus masking domain-specific (chemical) education.

11. Issue 1 Chemistry can be reduced to quantum mechanics?
Quantum mechanics has explained all of chemistry and most of physics. (Paul Dirac)

12. Explanation Explanatory autonomy of chemistry
Ex. Explanatory status of electronic orbitals in chemistry and their ontological status in QM.
‘The formation of bonds, redox chemistry, photochemistry and reactivity studies are all regularly discussed by reference to the intrechange of electrons between varoius kinds of orbitals.’
Teaching context

13. Issue 2 Electronic orbitals: models or reality?
There is a distinction to be made about the explanatory status of electronic orbitals in chemistry and their ontological status in QM.

14. Laws
Ex. The periodic law: ‘Exist a periodicity in the properties of the elements governed by certain intervals within their sequence arranged according to their atomic numbers’
Is a ‘chemical law’ irreducible to physics?
Historically, Mendeleev used a vast store of chemical intuition, rather than a straightforward algorithm.

15. Supervenience Supervenience is a relationship of asymmetric dependence
Micro/macro relationship
Microscopic identity does not implies macroscopic identity.
Ex. relationship between smell, colour, texture (macro) and molecular structure and bonding (micro).
The relationship between chemistry and physics has been taken as a paradigmatic case of true supervenience.

16. Teaching involves the co-ordination of content knowledge of a domain and knowledge about the epistemology of that domain.
Learning trajectory:
- knowledge generation
- evaluation
- revision (criticism)

17. Distributed cognition
Knowledge is a process that arises in the interaction of people, places and things.
Environment – Cognition is mediated by the social (cultural) and physical environment.
The culture surrounding the individuals influences what is leraned and how it is learned.
Tools – People use tools to construct understanding.
Concept of ‘tool’ embraces both physical objects (pen, calculators) and symbolic objects (mathematics, language).

18. Selected readings