Teaching Non-Majors: The Art of Engagement

What engages students? And what engages us in engaging them? Both of these questions need our attention as we consider how and why we should teach chemistry to non-science majors. Without engagement, learning becomes a chore, if not an impossibility. Likewise, without engagement teaching can become a task without a greater meaning. Thus, the engagement of all involved in the teaching and learning processes would seem to be a worthy goal. Worthy or not, however, it is not simple to achieve. Nor, at least in my experience, is engagement a goal that can be accomplished without a considerable investment of time and energy.
In this paper, I will first briefly describe a philosophy of engagement taken now by five consecutive authoring teams of Chemistry in Context, a project of the American Chemical Society. Most of what I discuss, however, will relate to the art of engagement and how I practice it at different levels. I will draw from my experiences of having taught non-science majors using Chemistry in Context for 10 semesters and having served on the authoring team through 3 editions, including the current one. Examples of engagement will be taken from Chapter 7 of Chemistry in Context, "The Fires of Nuclear Fission". I will hope to demonstrate both where engagement has worked well and where the challenges lie. And truly, I look forward to engaging the participants in this on-line symposium in these and other issues!