Integrating organic chemical-based socio-scientific issues comics into chemistry classroom: expanding chemists’ toolbox

Abstract

Over the past decades, there had been a growing concern for policy makers and scientists to implement the sustainable development (SD) agenda. To date, little efforts are made to instil early awareness and education for sustainable development (ESD) amongst the first-year undergraduates to become effective and responsible global citizens. As such, the learning of organic chemical-based socio-scientific issues (SSIs) within the scientific world is important to promote early awareness amongst chemistry undergraduates in SD. In this manuscript, for the first time comics drawing is being used as learning instruction to instil the ESD learning amongst first-year undergraduates at Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. In this activity, students made their own comics with regard to organic chemical-based SSIs they have read and shared their own comics, together with their reflective essays on the learning management system (LMS). Based on a survey result, students’ involvement in the current activity has resulted in their familiarity with the organic chemical-based SSIs. In addition, they have expressed a high degree of satisfaction toward the implemented activity and the chemistry content they learnt in this course based on the reflective essay received by the course instructor in the LMS.

Keywords

• basic organic chemistry
• comics
• education for sustainable development
• stimulating awareness about pollution from organic chemicals
• students’ active involvement