The purpose of this chapter is to describe a possible best practice to teaching chemistry from a humanitarian engineering perspective. The interest in teaching chemistry by focusing on humanitarian engineering arises from the economic and environmental concerns that the country of this study faces, some of which are poverty, climatic changes, food crisis, inadequate healthcare, water crisis, and pollution. As an educator, there is an interest in educating future generations to be able to cope with environmental changes that face their countries and the world at large. This exposition of a possible new approach with appropriate pedagogies that is presented here may be an answer that underdeveloped, developed, and emergent economies may adopt to close the gap between themselves and other industrialised nations.
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Science and technology have greatly enhanced some life activities, careers and longevity, due to improved healthcare and useful products that make life pleasurable. However, these feats have also resulted in the impairment and depletion of many natural resources and paradoxically man’s health and general welfare. Other occurrences such as ethnic conflicts, over population, poor mining practices, destruction of lands for agriculture, pollution of water bodies from mining activities and effluents from industries cause human crisis, directly or indirectly. Natural disasters such as floods, volcanic and forest fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and landslides have occurred without man’s intervention in the past and have been with us since creation. These environmental disasters, though life threatening, restored and healed themselves. However, in recent times, the intervention of adverse human activities, have resulted in man-made disasters that would require, once again, the intervention of humans to correct. Nearly two-thirds of the natural systems that provide services for humans are in distress and on the verge of collapse, or past retrieval (United Nations Statistics Division, 2005). Quite often, and unfortunately, it is the marginalised in society, and those with limited resources to fight the menace of natural disasters and industrialised wastes, that suffer the brunt or negative impacts of humanitarian challenges, even though they do not gain much from the benefits of science and technological applications. On a global scale, these negative impacts result in food crisis, financial crisis, water scarcity, poor health, migration issues, struggle for power and urbanisation in limited places that exceed carrying capacities with its attendant problems. Attempts at mitigating these challenges could be through science (chemistry) education and humanitarian engineering, especially as the identified challenges were also caused by humans in the first place. Collaboration between disciplines and stakeholders have attempted to provide positive solutions to human challenges.
Inequities in the distribution of resources such as food, shelter and healthcare (Nolet, 2009) have also led to poverty and diseases. The unique feature of this chapter is the concern for how to practice humanitarian engineering through a discipline such as chemical education, rather than its evaluation, so that countries with marginal economies will be inspired to adopt the approach to prepare their communities to cope squarely with environmental exploitation and humanitarian challenges. In this document, I will provide an outcome of an earlier study where microchemisty was integrated as a laboratory-based pedagogy in teaching chemistry. Adaptations that were made to the regular chemistry curriculum to produce an integrated microchemistry curriculum would be narrated briefly as it is not the object of this current exposition.