Incorporating environmental dilemmas into chemistry increases per- sonal relevance and raises issues of social justice.11 These dilemmas open up exploration of the political and ethical factors involved in understand- ing a scientific problem.21 social justice problems make chemistry mean- ingful to students and illustrate how their communities can benefit from Figure 18.4 Visualization of evaporation impacting molarity.
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understanding chemical processes and evidence-based argumentation in order to generate solutions. rather than taking additional instructional time, integrating knowledge of standards-aligned chemistry concepts and social justice factors deepens student understanding.11
rpps are drawing on expertise from organizations that serve communi- ties experiencing environmental problems to respond to the lack of social justice chemistry lessons in most precollege and college-level chemistry cur- riculum materials.16,17 They create visualizations that illustrate the chemical processes involved in the environmental problem as well as the social factors contributing to the inequitable impacts.
18.4.1 Chemical Reactions and Air Quality
This WIse middle school unit, designed by an rpp, explores the environ- mental impacts of hydrocarbon combustion in a local oil refinery.22 The les- son examines the disparate impacts of the refinery, located near the school community, on asthma rates among black americans compared to people of other races. It engages students in gathering evidence from visualizations to identify the factors that contribute to this environmental justice issue. The rpp included two middle school chemistry teachers, a social justice expert who had lived in and served the focal community, a curriculum designer, education researchers, and scientists.
The rpp localized the unit by including imagery and datasets from within or nearby the school community, incorporated teaching of redlining as a political factor that has contributed to the inequalities and highlighted the factors that can be understood and rectified using chemistry. The curriculum begins by grounding the study of chemistry in the local community. The unit features images of the local oil refinery and videos of scientists and activ- ists from the community who are using their understanding of air quality to advocate for change. It elicits students’ ideas based on their experiences ask- ing, what do you think might be some of the impacts of living near the freeways, railroads and refineries in Refinery City?
The unit connects the impact of the refinery to incomplete combustion.
students collaboratively interact with a visualization of a hydrocarbon com- bustion reaction and analyze a video about incomplete combustion. both support students to analyze the products of a combustion reaction that occurs with insufficient oxygen. embedded assessments prompt students to link chemistry ideas and social justice ideas. They are asked to use evi- dence from the visualizations to explain the products of incomplete combus- tion and its impacts on humans. students are asked if they think everyone is impacted by the reactions the same amount, or, if some people are more impacted than others and why.
next students explore interactive maps that display the quantity of particu- late matter pollution produced by incomplete combustion by neighborhood, in refinery city. They compare this map to another interactive map of asthma rates by neighborhood in the city. students explore the chemical properties
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of the products of incomplete combustion including diesel particles and particulate matter. They examine how these affect the lungs and other body systems when inhaled. This activity is designed to help students link ideas about air pollution from the refinery with health impacts.
students then analyze data represented in graphs illustrating the asthma hospitalization rates in the city by racial group. students discover the unequal impacts of air pollution on black communities who live near the refinery. To understand these inequities, the unit supports students to learn about the historical practice of redlining and to explore how redlining impacts who is impacted by the refinery caused air pollution. students use maps showing redlining and rates of pollution to distinguish between the impact of redlin- ing and the (lack of) impact of race on asthma rates.
Finally, students connect ideas in a reflection activity where they revisit (and revise if they choose) their explanation about who is impacted by air quality. They explain whether air quality impacts each person the same or differently. During the unit, students link their ideas about the chemical pro- cesses involved in an oil refinery, their ideas about air quality and asthma rates, and their ideas about how redlining has impacted who lives near the factory. For example, one 7th grader wrote, “I think the impacts [of the refin- ery] are different depending on where a person lives because if they’re near an area with a lot of incomplete combustion, they would probably inhale a lot of soot. Also, ...the previously redlined areas are closer to highways and industrial
& waste sites, so a lot of particulate matter pollute their air quality…Some of the groups or people affected by the impacts of air pollution include the workers in the refinery, the citizens of [city] and the African American/Black people living in the redlined areas closest to the refinery.”
last, to empower students to use their chemistry knowledge, students jointly generate ideas for policies or actions to ensure some communi- ties do not experience more harmful environmental impacts than others.
students put forth ideas such as, “First, have inspections that regulate how much pollutants that come out of refineries and if they exceed a certain point tell them they need a way to stop producing that much pollution.”. research demonstrated that students made significant gains in their understand- ing of the differential impacts of pollution depending on proximity to pollutants.22
In summary, rpps can design lessons that leverage visualizations to sup- port students’ evidence-based reasoning about chemistry in an environmen- tal justice dilemma. These lessons welcome students’ cultural, political, and ethical views as valuable ideas for learning chemistry. These lessons motivate students to construct integrated knowledge of chemistry concepts by link- ing their ideas from personal experience with ideas from instruction. stud- ies of how students reason about chemistry in environmental dilemmas are also broadening the boundaries of what constitutes chemistry knowledge.
This change is driving designers to create new visualizations that support the investigation of social factors that illustrate how chemistry phenomena affect communities.
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18.4.2 Affordances of Physical and Virtual Laboratories
Visualizations enable curriculum designers to create virtual laboratories to reinforce, replace, or enhance physical laboratories. both virtual and physi- cal laboratories have valuable affordances (see Table 18.1).1,23–25 as this chap- ter illustrates, virtual laboratories can extend physical laboratories about chemical reactions to environmental dilemmas and to issues of social jus- tice. multiple studies combining virtual and physical laboratories show the benefit of connecting molecular visualizations to physical investigations in chemistry.1,26 Comparisons of physical and virtual laboratories reveal the advantages of each format. a recent study found that students working with virtual models engaged in significantly more discussions about making pre- dictions and understanding relationships between variables, than did stu- dents working with physical models.24 Contrary to expectations, the virtual model prepared students as well as the physical model for subsequent phys- ical experiments with physical materials.
Direct comparisons of virtual and physical laboratories often try to repli- cate the physical laboratory in the virtual format by equating conditions.27 This approach eliminates the affordances of each format. Instead, research is needed that establishes the value of the unique affordances of each format.
Further, research is needed to capture the opportunities that result from combining virtual and physical laboratories such as shown in research on environmental dilemmas and social justice.
To promote integrated understanding, analysis of studies comparing vir- tual and physical laboratories using the Knowledge Integration (KI) pedagogy reveals factors that differentiate investigations of virtual and physical labora- tories. most laboratories support students to discover new ideas. Virtual and
Table 18.1 affordances of virtual and physical laboratories.
Virtual laboratory affordances physical laboratory affordances
● Can make visible the relationship between microscopic [molecular], vast [solar system], fast [motion], and complex [photosynthesis, force] phenomena.
● Can give students agency to choose their investigation and even conduct “impossi- ble” or dangerous experiments.
● Can enable discussions where students dis- tinguish among their ideas while planning a series of virtual experiments.
● makes testing multiple conditions efficient.
● Can reduce student concerns about danger- ous or toxic chemicals and about breaking glassware or apparatus.
● Can enable students to manipulate the code behind the visualization and design alterna- tive experiments.
● Can support students to test questions that go beyond those in a virtual laboratory.
● Can build students’ skill in using equipment and machines in physical laboratories.
● Can support students to cooper- ate to conduct separate parts of the experiment.
● Can embody the laboratory experience.
● Can prepare students to deal with unanticipated conse- quences, experience “error” of measurement, and troubleshoot failed experiments.
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physical laboratories differ in supporting students to distinguish among their prior and newly discovered ideas. Visualizations enable students to probe their own ideas by conducting multiple virtual experiments, even including experi- ments that would be impossible in a physical laboratory. In addition, as illus- trated in this chapter, virtual laboratories can support students to investigate models of complex environmental dilemmas to deepen their understanding.
While both physical and virtual laboratories can prompt students to reflect on their investigations, a key aspect of KI, reflections are often more powerful in virtual laboratories. In virtual laboratories, students have time to use inter- active visualizations to intentionally seek evidence to investigate their conjec- tures; they can gather convincing evidence to support their reflections.