Starting with Synthetic Routes: A Cooperative Case Study to Engage Second Year Organic Chemistry Students in Evaluating Solutions Using Green Chemistry Metrics

In academic and industrial chemistry societies, green chemistry and sustainability are the focus of emergent efforts to address grand global challenges; these priorities are now reflected in the guidelines for chemistry education as the “Normal Expectations” for ACS-approved Bachelor’s degree programs. Furthermore, the phenomena posed by the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and sustainability issues have enormous potential to inspire undergraduate science students. However, in the case of the undergraduate chemistry curriculum, integrating sustainability challenges─often the result of complex chemistry interacting at the boundaries of social or environmental systems─presents design challenges for curriculum developers working with learners’ nascent knowledge base. To meet this crucial need for sustainability education, successful integration of green and sustainable chemistry into the curriculum requires a deep knowledge of how people learn and an understanding of how to use this knowledge to design curricula and curricular materials to support learning. In this article, we offer a case study designed using our framework to incorporate green chemistry and sustainability; the purpose of this case study is to engage students in constructing an explanation of the underlying chemistry as well as defining a sustainability problem with respect to stakeholders’ needs. Our design efforts are demonstrated through examples of students’ engagement with and responses to the scaffolded case study design.