Chapter 9: Accessing Chemical Concepts for Teaching and Learning

The role of the chemistry teacher may be considered to be, at least in part, to teach the canonical concepts of chemistry to learners. That begs the question of how the teacher knows what to teach. We might like to think that chemistry teachers will have been taught these concepts by their own teachers – but that clearly invites a regress that only shifts the explicandum. Even teachers with good subject knowledge will surely need to sometimes check what is current canonical chemical knowledge, to ensure they are teaching correct and up-to-date chemistry. This chapter enquires into how someone, such as a chemistry teacher, might access the canonical concepts of the discipline of chemistry. It is suggested that the common-sense idea that such concepts can be found in texts such as the scientific literature and textbooks is not without problems. Similarly, the idea that such knowledge is shared among the community of practising chemists and so could potentially be accessed from that source also raises difficulties. A third possibility, that employs a kind of rationalism relying on intuition about the natural world, is clearly fallible, and so also falls short. Canonical concepts seem to be more elusive than we might expect, and this contributes to the challenge of teaching and learning them.