A resource on decolonization in the chemistry department: a case study of black people in the UK, and how Africans and black people are treated
As a Black person in the United Kingdom, all of my schoolteachers were white. I had learned about James and Francis from age 15 to 24. I was taught to revere these men for discovering DNA’s structure, but I had to stumble onto the fact on my own that Watson has gone on record as saying that Black people are intellectually inferior.
The resource has been compiled and annotated since October of 2016 with funding from the Royal Society of Chemistry. The resource provides examples for teaching high-school or university-level courses. When she joined York in August 2016, she was pleased that the department had a reputation for being engaged in equity, diversity and inclusion work, but she still wanted to find more role models. She discovered that there were many important discoveries in the literature from other countries and cultures. People like me contributed a lot.
The chemistry department at the University of York is known for being progressive in its stance on inclusion and diversity, as an early adopter of a decolonizing agenda. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual people are included in the needs of the policies, which include diversity and inclusion training for undergrad 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 2019, York students from a variety of disciplines started to urge senior faculty members to decolonize their curricula. This includes ensuring there is a diverse community in departments, as well as ensuring that course materials encompass sources from all parts of society and the world, and reflecting the lived experience of the diverse student body. In the 2012–13 academic year, 25% of the York students were identified as Black and minority ethnic, rising to 42% in the 21st century.
In the city of York, 93% of residents are white, according to 2021 census data. “The environment is not very diversified,” says Kelechi Uleanya, a postdoctoral research associate in Dessent’s research group. Uleanya hails from Nigeria, where she completed her undergraduate and master’s studies in chemistry. She noticed when she was working as a graduate teaching assistant in the undergraduate labs at York that there were other GTAs who could use some training in how cultures approach practical work.
Some GTAs may not have had a lot of contact with people of other cultures and this may explain why students engage in different ways in problem sets. For some of them, it was a shock meeting. The approach to things of students from different cultures is totally different in the labs.
Dessent, the Aboriginal people and the science of our world: an update on what you’re teaching and what you can do to improve it
Dessent wrote to all of them detailing the decolonizing aims. She says it is vital that you explain why you are doing equality, diversity and inclusion work so that people won’t try to criticize it. “Decolonizing is one of those things that currently does attract a certain amount of negative publicity. People don’t understand what they are trying to achieve through it. It is something very pragmatic.
Steps towards achieving this include changing the taught material to be more reflective of contributions from scientists other than those who are white and male, but it also means working to change the culture in the department, she says.
To help broaden the curriculum, Dessent asked the faculty to scrutinize the courses they are currently teaching and look for places to introduce some context. In a course on colloid chemistry, the lecturer discussed how ancient Babylonians produced the first known lubricating gels and how they were used to grease chariots. In a course about global history of medicine instructors used examples from China, India, the Arab world and Indigenous Australian cultures.
These examples, along with many others, have been collated into an evolving document by Uleanya and her colleagues (O. K. Uleanya et al. Preprint at ChemRxiv.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00644-7
Teaching Chemistry by Reactivity: What Happens When You Make A Molecule? A Case Study of the Grignard Reaction for Students in Green Chemistry
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. “There is no need for the name of a reaction to reflect a person,” says Smith. Instead, those reactions can be taught by their reactivity — what actually happens if that kind of reaction is performed on a certain kind of molecule. 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 reaction starts by making a molecule containing a halogen, a magnesium atom and an organic group.
This would make sense for a number of students, as they would no longer need to memorize names and instead think more about the chemistry in the reactions. “Very often, by decolonizing the name you can make things clearer,” says Smith. But wholesale rewriting and reprinting of textbooks, as well as adopting a different name for a historically well-known procedure, is likely to be a slow process, he adds.
Matharu isn’t convinced that this kind of collation exercise is ambitious enough. “The easiest thing to do is find lots of examples in the literature for minority ethnic researchers,” he says, but describes this approach as too simple. If a student asked a follow-up question after the teacher or lecturer had included an example as a box ticking exercise, the instructor wouldn’t have much further 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.
It was Matharu who introduced the section in essays in which students had to look up country and institution of the authors on all their papers to create a bar chart. The 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. Matharu totted up the countries of the corresponding authors and realized that there were hardly any from the countries where coffee is actually produced. 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. “When they start to write their narrative, or even see the plot, the plot should already encourage them that their literature is biased.” 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.”
He says one student wrote that they were made think about the origins of the papers on a deeper level after reading the review. He says that it is quite a profound statement. I changed the mindset of that student. He has dubbed the authorship charts ‘Matharu plots’.
The black student from Nigeria who studied chemistry as a undergrad in his home country, decided to enroll in the green chemistry master’s program at York. The graphs are easy to put together, however the results are not good. “Matharu plots are an eye-opener to my open bias of Western literatures. I used to think that the white scientists dominated the educational system but now look for papers from a more diverse 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.