The music of chemistry: from solfeggio to vocation. The influence of chemistry teaching on its public image

Abstract

From its discovery at school to its professional practice, apprehending a subject matter (be it chemistry or music) lies on four essential poles: the painfulness of the learnings, the pleasure of the practice, the interest of the acquired knowledge and the personal dynamics of the pupil. We will show how the image of chemistry can suffer if one of these four poles is neglected in its teaching, and that this wobble can ultimately and respectively turn it, among our students “future fellow-citizens”, into a “coded theoretical subject matter”, a “disembodied magical show”, an “irrelevant field of study” and a “career out of reach”. Through this analysis grid, studying school programs then allows us to have a better understanding of the influence that chemistry teaching may have had on its image for the past two decades, for those who approached it by the sole angle of their schooling. Complex and paradoxical, there lies in chemistry specific hurdles (didactical, epistemological, cognitive, affective…), that do not exist in other disciplines and that cause all kinds of impediments regarding its learning. Finally, understanding this set of data allows us to imagine inventive threads capable of halting the negative effects produced, by teaching, in the relationship between students and “future citizens former pupils” with chemistry.