UMN hosts Green & Sustainable Chemistry Workshop for High School Teachers
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (06/23/2023) – The Department of Chemistry hosted sixteen high school teachers earlier this week for a three-day Green and Sustainable Chemistry workshop. The workshop, run by Professor Jane Wissinger and Minnesota high school teachers Cassie Knutson Lydon and Cassie Javner aims to provide high school teachers with tools to integrate green and sustainable chemistry into their classrooms. This is the sixth year UMN Chemistry has hosted the workshop, which has now served more than 100 high school instructors.
Participants spend three days in UMN labs and discussion groups, gaining hands-on experience through eight different lab activities. The labs represent safer and greener chemistries to be considered as additions or replacements for traditional curriculum. Knutson Lydon and Javner – both Beyond Benign Lead Teachers – supported the lab activities and moderated discussion of the experiments. The workshop also holds space for participating teachers to discuss their experiences and create an outline for implementing green chemistry practices in their curriculum. Making a plan to introduce two new, green experiments or classroom activities into the upcoming academic year is the goal for each participant.
The workshop was funded by the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, the University of Minnesota Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program, and the NSF Center for Sustainable Polymers (CSP). Learn more about Green Chemistry at the University of Minnesota.
