Chapter 12: How Are Chemical Concepts Represented in Teaching?

In everyday communication, or in communication within an expert community (such as among chemists), people normally rely upon the person they are communicating with having in place the internal resources (existing concepts and understandings) to understand the information communicated as intended. A research chemist promoting a new concept can explain it in formal chemical language assuming that her own technical concepts are largely aligned with those of others in the community that the specialist communication is intended for. Chemical education presents a very different challenge, as the interpretive resources needed to understand the disciplinary content of chemistry the way chemists understand it, is simply not available. Teaching needs to build up those very resources. Teachers do this by relating what is to be taught to experiences and ideas that are already familiar to learners, to slowly make the formal concepts of chemistry themselves familiar, until they can be drawn upon as background for further teaching. Initially, chemistry has to be understood (at some level) in familiar everyday terms, before there can be an iterative shift towards more technical accounts using abstract chemical concepts. This is illustrated with a hypothetical teaching episode illustrating the kinds of teaching moves employed in making the unfamiliar familiar in the classroom.