New Perspectives in Science Education

Scientific research and its results are difficult for the general public to conceive, since they are mainly communicated between experts in the respective field and presented in a way hardly comprehensible to laypersons. This leads to a separation between science and society and consequently to a lack of awareness and often mutual appreciation. The didactic reconstruction [1] of current research results can make future-oriented topics and their associated research goals and methods accessible to society and education. It offers students and teachers not only motivating learning opportunities and contexts, but also enables them to participate in social discourses in the sense of scientific literacy and opens up new career perspectives. To the interested public it further offers the opportunity to encounter future technologies, to obtain first-hand information in a comprehensible way and to participate in scientific and educational policy debates.
The field of photocatalysis is currently subject of intense research and offers excellent learning opportunities. Related products also find broad applications in everyday life, science and technology, ranging from solar collectors to photocatalytic wastewater treatment , light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and beyond. Due to their strong connection to everyday life, their great economic and ecological significance and their possibilities for interdisciplinary approaches and contexts, they offer great potential for teaching in formal and non-formal educational programs. From a didactical point of view, they offer a variety of interdisciplinary learning opportunities and numerous references to the basic concepts of energy, chemical reaction and structural properties. In addition, there are numerous links to many classical topics and content fields of chemistry lessons at secondary level II. Only one example of how photocatalysis can be implemented in a way that is oriented towards everyday life is described in [2].

In this article it is presented how current research results on photocatalysis can be reconstructed didactically and implemented into schools and student laboratories. In close collaboration with chemistry research groups teaching concepts, materials and (model) experiments have been developed that can be carried out with harmless chemicals and low cost analytics [3].

Keywords: chemistry education, didactic reconstruction, photocatalysis.

References:

1. I. Parchmann, S. Schwarzer, T. Wilke, M. Tausch, T. Waitz, CHEMKON 2017, 4, 161-164, DOI: 10.1002/ckon.201790001
2. K. Artelt, F. Kutteroff, T. Wilke, T. Waitz, A. Habekost, PdN-ChiS 2015, 1, 25-28.
3. M. Wejner, T. Wilke, CHEMKON 2019, 7, 294-300, DOI: 10.1002/ckon.201900016