Getting Community College Students into the Lab with Green Chemistry

Education, University/College Programs, Washington

July 22, 2016

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(Green Chemistry: The Nexus Blog) During the GC&E conference in June, we had a chance to catch up with Rick Glover, a chemistry teacher at Bellevue College in Washington State. In an interview, he discussed how he gets community college students into the lab and engaged in real-world sustainability challenges.

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A lot of my work at my community college has pivoted toward getting students I teach into the lab, rather than on research I started previously. I’ve tried to address questions like, how do you get students to understand the real processes involved in science? And, how do you get students to really gain an understanding of where chemicals will end up in the environment?

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There was an ACS paper that came out last November that discussed finding these plastics, so it was captivating for the students. They could look at the same roadblocks discussed in the paper and say, okay, we think we’ve found these but how can we reasonably assess that this is what we’ve found? There was another student whose family eats a lot of rice, and she was using the ICP-MS to analyze the amounts of arsenic in different commercially available rice products since rice is one of those products that happens to bio-accumulate arsenic. So it’s really beneficial to get projects that students are interested in and that affect their daily lives.

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I’ve found that sometimes students who don’t excel at coursework do excel at research. Because there’s no right answer, it’s not always the book-smart students who are the best researchers. We hope they build the ability to address the question: what can be done with both good and bad data? Sometimes we sacrifice the time it takes to get research results in exchange for the ability to teach students about a method. READ MORE

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