REPORT
FROM MAURITIUS
The island of Mauritius (Île Maurice,
en français), a tiny dot in the Indian Ocean
at 20º S latitude and 57º E longitude, is located
about 1,000 km east of Madagascar off the southeastern coast
of Africa. Home to about 1.2 million people and the
University of Mauritius, it was the site of ICCE 2008, which
was held on August 3-8, at Le Méridien Hotel in Pointe
aux Piments. Attracting about 200 attendees from 40
countries, the conference, which had Chemistry in the
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Age as
its theme, offered 170 oral presentations and 58 posters. It
was organized by a local committee headed by Conference President
Henri Li Kam Wah and Conference Chairman Ponnadurai Ramasami
of the Department of Chemistry of the University. Welcoming
remarks were made by Peter Mahaffy (Canada), chair of the
IUPAC Committee on Chemistry Education (CCE); Dharambeer
Gokhool, Mauritius Minister of Education and Human Resources;
I. Fagoonee, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Mauritius;
Ambassador Kalimi Mugambi Mworia (Kenya), Director of the
International Cooperation and Assistance Division of the
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),
which was a financial sponsor of the conference.
Plenary lectures were given by nine distinguished chemists
and educators: Roald Hoffmann (U.S.A.), Chemistry’s
Essential Tensions: Different Ways of Looking at a Science;
Peter Mahaffy (Canada), Communicating the Chemistry of
Climate Change with ICT and Paraffin; Loretta Jones (U.S.A.), How
Technology can Help Students to Visualize the Molecular World
without Inducing Misconceptions about Chemistry; Henry
Schaefer III (U.S.A.), Lesions in DNA Subunits: Foundational
Studies of Molecular Structures and Energetics; Arthur
Olson (U.S.A.), Back to the Future: Grasping Molecular
Biology with Tangible Interfaces; Peter Atkins (U.K.), The
Future of the Book; Vandana Hunma (Mauritius), Chemistry
Education for Socially Responsible and Sustainable Development:
What are the Challenges for a Developing Countrty?; John
Bradley (South Africa), Substances, Molecules and Symbols
in the ICT Age; Shalini Baxi (India), Community Based
Collaborative ICT Strategies for Science Education.
The parallel oral sessions centered
around the following themes: teaching chemistry at the secondary
and tertiary levels, chemistry education research, the use
of modern technologies, green chemistry, involvement of the
arts, public understanding of chemistry, chemistry teacher
education. In addition, symposia were
held on best practices in professional development, Process
Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL), increasing the popularity
and relevance of school chemistry, structural models and chemical
understanding, and the systemic approach to teaching and learning
chemistry (SATL). Workshops were offered on the teaching
of advanced chemistry courses, electrochemical model experiments,
air and water environment, and strategies to assist students
to learn chemistry.
The organization of the program
gave participants ample time to interact and develop connections. In
addition to morning and afternoon coffee/tea breaks and daily
group lunches, evening events included a welcoming reception,
an entertainment evening with local singers and dancers,
the conference banquet at a Chinese restaurant in Port Louis,
the Mauritian capital city, and participants night with national
songs and performances. The
day-long conference tour in the middle of the week to sites
of interest on the island provided a delightful break.
For three weeks prior to the ICCE,
an on-line virtual conference was held in which 45 papers
were presented and 371 participants from 44 countries participated
in the discussions. Immediately
prior to the main conference, a Young Ambassadors of Chemistry
(YAC) workshop was held in Mauritius; 30 local chemistry teachers
attended and performed chemical demonstrations to students
and the public. In addition, a drama on the history of
chemistry was presented at the conference that was very well
appreciated by the audience.
ICCE 2008 also featured a post-conference
satellite meeting at the University of Nairobi that was sponsored
by the Kenya Chemical Society. Sixty delegates, mainly
from Kenya with representatives from Uganda and Tanzania,
attended, including university staff, students, and secondary
school teachers of chemistry.
Details of all the conference programs
are available on the ICCE 2008 website: <http://www.uom.ac.mu/icce/index.asp>.
The ICCE was also the occasion of
the annual meeting of the IUPAC Committee on Chemistry Education
(CCE), which consists of titular members, divisional representatives,
and national representatives. The Committee approved
the minutes of its last meeting in Torino in August 2007
at the time of the IUPAC General Assembly and Congress, received
the minutes of the CCE strategy meeting at the Chemical Heritage
Foundation in Philadelphia earlier in 2008, and heard reports
from subcommittees.
The Subcommittee on Chemistry for
Development reported on the two-day conference on “Improving Chemical Education
in the Philippines” that was held at the University of
Santo Tomas in Manila, April 17-18, 2008, as a project of the “Flying
Chemists Program,” in which IUPAC chemical education
experts collaborate with academic institutions and governmental
officials of a country toward the betterment of its educational
system. More than 320 tertiary-level chemistry teachers
heard lectures by Peter Atkins (U.K.), Peter Mahaffy (Canada),
Jorge Ibañez (México), Mei-Hung Chiu (Taiwan),
and Fortunato Sevilla (Philippines), attended workshops, and
participated in discussions. For more details, see Chemistry
International, Vol. 30, No. 4 (2008). The activities
of the Network for Inter-Asian Chemistry Educators (NICE) were
also described; its third symposium for the exchange of teaching
strategies and materials among teachers and faculty in Korea,
Japan, and Taiwan will be held July 29-30, 2009, at Tokyo Gakugei
University <nice2009@u-gakugei.ac.jp>.
The
central current effort of the Subcommittee on the Public Understanding
of Chemistry is to work with IUPAC and its National Adhering
Organizations toward the proclamation of 2011 as the International
Year of Chemistry by UNESCO and the UN. Through the incredibly
hard work of Ethiopia and the support of Algeria, Benin, China,
Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Egypt, France, India, Japan, Kuwait, Madagascar, Malaysia,
Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation,
Senegal, South Africa, Togo, Uganda, and the United Republic
of Tanzania and Zambia, the Executive Board of UNESCO approved
the resolution and passed it on to the next meeting of the
UNESCO General Conference; if approved there, the resolution
would move to the UN General Assembly. The devoted efforts
of Lida Schoen (Netherlands) toward the implementation of the
programs of YAC and the evaluation of their success were recognized. CCE
discussed ways in which this outstanding project could be sustained.
The next meeting of CCE will take
place at the 42nd IUPAC Congress, August 2-7, 2009, in Glasgow,
Scotland. The
21st ICCE (Chemistry Education and Sustainability in the
Global Age) will be held in Taipei, Taiwan, August 8-13,
2010.
[Reprinted from Chemistry International, Vol. 31, No.
1 (2009), by permission.]
Photographs (by M.Z. Hoffman) |
