Part of a larger whole

A systems thinking approach to chemistry education asks students and teachers to think about the subject in new ways. Rather than teaching chemistry as a collection of discrete facts, systems thinking emphasizes the interactions between the components of a system, how they change over time, and the behaviors that arise from them. Systems thinking also examines the ways chemistry affects and is affected by outside forces, including economics, the environment, and people, a lens that mirrors many of the ideas of green chemistry. C&EN looks at recent efforts at three universities to introduce these concepts to undergraduates. Almost anyone who has taken a chemistry course will tell you it can be a maddeningly complex subject. It comprises dozens of elements that can bond and interact in myriad ways, governed by several textbooks’ worth of laws and empirical rules. And that’s all before those chemicals interact with the world as medicines,