Taylor Teaching Symposium

We share many big-picture goals for chemistry learning. We may want to equip students in our classes to think in ways they will encounter beyond school, prepare future chemists, or cultivate an appreciation for the power and utility of the chemical sciences. Unfortunately, it is far from clear how day-to-day instructional and assessment practices can move us toward these goals. As such, we must iteratively reflect on and refine our in-the-moment goals and practices in a slow and often winding journey toward our grand ambitions for chemistry learning. Here, I will reflect on two such journeys I have been a part of. The first of these is a ~6-year collaboration with staff and faculty colleagues who teach organic chemistry. I will consider how changes to our assessments have driven shifts in curricular architecture that potentially make the course more coherent to students. Second, I will reflect on a more recent collaboration involving colleagues from Chemistry, Planning & Landscape Architecture, and the City of Madison. This collaboration demonstrates how thinking with community partners can help us better approximate scenarios where chemistry is used and useful in daily life. As I unpack both of these stories, I will focus attention on how our goals and practices shifted throughout the journey, as well as constraints we were forced to contend with. In doing so, I hope to present a hopeful vision of learning environment transformation that is grounded in the messy realities of reconfiguring complex systems.