#1024: “Why Should I Care Where My Chemicals Come From?”: Design-Based Research on Chemistry Graduate Students’ Systems Thinking

Solutions to the climate crisis require a significant shift in professional training and practice of chemists. However, the proposed holistic, systems thinking approach is a complex performance and may conflict with narratives about what “is” and “is not” chemistry. To study how chemistry doctoral students may develop a sustainable worldview through formal instructional support, a systems and sustainability course was designed with an ecofeminist lens and Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory. The unsuccessful hypothesis was that graduate-level chemists can generate holistic research problem definitions through a scaffolded set of modules to engage in systems thinking, values thinking, futures thinking, and strategic thinking.