The chemistry course tackles bias
Why do we need chemistry to improve access for black, Asian and minority-ethnic students? A case study of York’s chemistry department
Although I finished my PhD earlier this year, I am part of a country-wide project involving UKRI and the UK Office for Students, an independent regulatory body for higher education, to improve access and participation for Black, Asian and minority-ethnic students (BAME) in postgraduate research study. Getting universities to understand all of the problem is one of the biggest challenges. They suggest that the sort of deep introspective work needed to make significant change is not suited to the level of the actions being suggested. The history and contemporary relationship between race and science can be examined with funds.
Faculty members were encouraged to include the work of individual non-Western chemists. For example, the medicinal chemistry course highlights the Chinese scientist Tu Youyou, who was the first scientist working in China to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She combined her knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine and modern drug discovery techniques to develop the anti-malarial drug artemisinin. David Smith, who is white British and is a prominent advocate for Equity, Diversity and inclusion in York’s chemistry department, says that you isolated the active ingredient and did all the research to turn it into a pharmaceutical drug. He points out that, ironically, the production of that drug “is now controlled by Western companies, and still isn’t available in sub-Saharan Africa”, where it is most needed to combat malaria. Teaching this context as part of a pure chemistry course adds a globalized aspect to the curriculum that shows students how chemistry intersects with traditional knowledge, culture and politics, he says.
At the University of York, the chemistry department is an early adopter of a decolonizing agenda and is already known for its progressive stance on inclusion and diversity. This includes LGBT+ friendly policies that take into account the needs of people from sexual and gender minorities; diversity and inclusion training for all undergraduate and postgraduate students; and unconscious-bias training for all recruitment panels. In 2007, it was the first department to achieve a gold Athena Swan award, the highest honour of the UK-wide programme, which recognizes significant gender-equity efforts in the sciences.
In her newsletter to staff, Dessent laid out why the department was embarking on this course of action. According to data from the UK National Union of Students, the gap between the number of top-honours degrees given to white UK students and their Black and minority ethnic counterparts was 16.1%, while at York there was a similar gap. Dessent noted that, in the NUS survey, 42% of Black students say that the curriculum does not reflect issues of diversity, equality and discrimination. Some of the students and women don’t feel comfortable speaking in class. Our undergraduate courses should not disadvantage any student because of their background. All of our students should have equal opportunities to thrive in our department,” she wrote.
According to the data from the census, 98% of Yorkers are white. Kelechi Uleanya is a research associate in Dessent’s research group. Uleanya earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees in chemistry from Nigeria. She noticed that other GTAs could have benefited from some training on how cultures take different approaches to practical work when she worked as a graduate teaching assistant at York.
“Some [GTAs] might not have had serious contact with people of different cultures” and therefore lack context about why students might engage in problem sets or labs in different ways, she says. “So, for some of them it’s a shock meeting Students from different cultures in the laboratories have a completely different approach to things.
Maintaining a dialog with stakeholders is important for implementing a decolonizing agenda, says Karodia. Students seem to accept change more readily, in her experience, but staff need to be convinced of the values of the liberals. Some staff will never be convinced, and we have to live with that too”, she says.
Changing teaching material to reflect contributions from scientists other than white and male is one of the steps that’s being taken to achieve this.
Smith insists that the department isn’t trying to dictate to lecturers what to include in their teaching material. Instead, “it has been a bit more about role modelling the contexts of chemistry”, he says. He suggests that scientists outside of the countries that dominate the literature could be used to show how chemistry can solve problems in low-income countries.
Why does the name of a reaction make sense? The chemistry of Grignard and Uleanya, Smith, and the future of decolonization
Uleanya and her colleagues have compiled a number of examples into an evolving document. Preprint at ChemRxiv https://doi.org/jzfb; 2022).
And yet in chemistry, lots of the reactions that students learn are named after the often-white male chemist who is credited with discovering or developing them. Smith did not say there was a need for the name of the reaction to reflect a person. The kind of reaction that happens on that molecule can be learned from the reactivity of that reaction. For example, the Grignard reaction, which is used in the formation of carbon–carbon bonds, is named after French chemist Victor Grignard. Smith says that the Grignard reagent is a molecule containing a magnesium atom and an organic group, which could be called an organomagnesium halide.
For many students, this is likely to make more sense — removing the need to simply memorize names and instead think more deeply about the chemistry that the reactions exemplify. Smith says that decolonizing the name can make things clearer. It’s likely to be a slow process of wholesale rewrite and reprinting of textbooks and adopting a different name for a well-known procedure.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00644-7
Teaching students to realise where the science is biased: Matharu plots for a green chemistry master’s degree student in York, Nigeria
Matharu isn’t convinced that this kind of collation exercise is ambitious enough. He says that it is easy to find examples in the literature for minority ethnic researchers. If a student had a follow-up question, and the teacher or lecturer had included it as a box-ticking exercise, the instructor wouldn’t have a lot of context to add. Matharu has developed his own teaching methods that lead students to realize for themselves how implicitly biased science and the scientific literature are. “I was very keen that we need to start the conversation,” he says.
For example, Matharu introduced a section in written essays, in which students have to look up the country and institution of the corresponding authors on all the papers they cite and construct a bar chart. Inevitably, these plots are dominated by US, EU and UK researchers. He first introduced this after marking a student project on coffee production, which predominantly happens in the global south. There were hardly any from countries where coffee is actually produced when you looked at the countries where the corresponding authors are from. Now, for all the projects in his postgraduate course on green chemistry, the students must write a narrative about the trend they see in cited authorship.
“That’s really eye-opening,” says Matharu. The plot of their narrative should encourage them that their literature is biased when they start to write it. Matharu now gives points, which count towards a student’s final degree mark, for completing this exercise. “It’s not something that’s too onerous,” he says, “but it’s something that starts to change their behaviour; it gets them to think.”
One student, he says, wrote that the review made them think about the origin of the papers on a deeper level. He says that is quite a profound statement. I changed the way of thinking for that student. He has dubbed the authorship charts ‘Matharu plots’.
Arinzechukwu Ngoka, who is Black and studied chemistry as an undergraduate in his home country of Nigeria, came to York to pursue the green chemistry master’s course. The graphs are easy to make, but the results are very bad. “Matharu plots are an eye-opener to my open bias of Western literatures. I used to believe that the white scientists dominated the educational system in the past, but now look for papers from more than one group of authors.
Matharu hopes that other institutions will take on his idea, and he has presented it to the Royal Society of Chemistry and to some major publishers, he says.
