How can chemistry teachers learn from each other?

[instrumental music] Hey, I'm Melissa, and today we do have one of our Community Conversation moderators, Jo-Ann Stewart.

I'm so excited to have her here today.

So before we get started, Jo-Ann, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your relationship is with chemistry and chemistry education?

Well, thank you, Melissa.

I'm really happy to be here as well.

Um, I'm a chemistry professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, which is a liberal arts undergraduate-only institution.

And, um, in terms of sort of the connection to this upcoming conversation, early in my career I worked on a big NSF-funded systemic change in chemistry project, um, and that really introduced me to just the joy of working in community with other chemists on this, this kind of work.

Um, mid-career I kind of shifted gears a little bit and was very interested in interdis- interdisciplinary teaching and learning, and, uh, was able to work with some sort of like Howard Hughes Medical Institute funding to run a program at Hope College, uh, was able to work with the Carnegie Foundation as what was called a CASL scholar, and so it was a lot of fun.

And, um, uh, that's where I sort of got involved in, deeply in the scholarship of teaching and learning, or SoTL.

Uh, and then the last 15 years I've been working with communities of practice, uh, in particular with, uh, an inorg- I'm an inorganic chemist, so in particular with the inorg- inorganic group called IONIC, uh, which is focused on improving teaching and learning in, in inorganic chemistry at the undergraduate level.

And, um, more recently, just in the last few years of working to try to bring all the various chemistry communities of practice together, and we're sort of, uh, calling that, uh, the, the community of communities.

[laughs] Well, I will say I'm very impressed and excited to hear all that you've done in your career.

You know, I know you're, you're, um, mentioned to me that you're moving towards retirement, which is very exciting, and I sort of have just started in my career, and so it's amazing to think of all that you've learned in that time and how much newer faculty member like myself can learn, [laughs] you know, about how to, um, improve our teaching and learning as an ongoing practice throughout our career.

So that is very exciting.

And you already mentioned a little bit about, um, communities of practice, but can you give a brief overview of really what communities of practice are, especially for our listeners who some of them are gonna be high school educators, some of them are gonna be all the way up through college, um, educators or even researchers, and they may not know what communities of practice are.

So a community of practice, sort of simply put, is just a group of people, a group of folks who want to Um, learn about something together.

It's as simple as that.

[inhales]

Sort of somewhat more formally, you know, the community of practice has, uh, th- a domain, um, sort of the, the thing, the, the shared interest, which for, um, Ionic was always inorganic chemistry.

Um, it has a community, and that's the relationships and the activities and what the folks do together.

Um, and then it has the practice part, which is simply the thing they want to learn about.

Um, and so in these chemistry communities of practice, the, the domain or the, well, the thing that they wanna learn about could range from y- um, sort of being a more effective teacher in, in various areas of chemistry.

It can be research-focused.

It could be developing laboratories for students.

Um, there's just a, a broad range of communities of practice in chemistry that are out there.