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When I was younger, my parents would drag me round museums with Greco-Roman clay plates and tried to explain how significant they were; but ancient kitchenware didn’t prove a cause of excitement. Now, with my own children, I too drag them round museums skipping over words and dancing in my excitement at ancient plates, “ look it’s Heracles slaying a lion again…”. Plates have always been important to us.

THE PLATE

Character, moral or virtue education is not only the how but the why of education. At a recent conference summarising ten years of educational research into character development a keynote speaker put it to me that “character education is the plate that you eat off.” Without a plate, a meal quickly turns into a mess.

Bradfield, through careful consultation with staff, parents and pupils has identified six values or virtues that they wish every Bradfieldian to exhibit in their personal and professional lives: confidence, open-mindedness, resilience, inquiry, communication and innovation. These should permeate our language, our interactions, our sanctions and rewards. Pupils who exhibit such virtues are placed on an equal footing with the best of scholars or sports people. You can’t measure them, and the full fruit may only be obvious in a decade’s time.

Chemistry provides the pupil with skills which can take you anywhere.

THE FOOD

Chemistry, or for that matter any discipline, is like the food on that plate. As a subject, Chemistry provides the pupil with skills which we claim can take you anywhere. The Royal Society of Chemistry names scientific and technical knowledge, communication, working with others, logical thought processes and problem solving, project and time management, numeracy, handling data, software and technology as benefits of learning the subject at a high level. These desirable skills are learnt through the process of seeking scientific truth and understanding. Push the analogy, and these are the cutlery to our plate. You use them all the time and get very good at using them, but they’re not the purpose of having a meal. Eat a meal with the intention of practicing your knife technique and I image you quickly lose interest.

How do we teach character, or the Education for Life values, through Chemistry? Well, as the saying goes: “Character is caught, character is taught and character is sought.”

 

CHARACTER IS CAUGHT

It’s not what you teach, so much as how you teach it. Education for Life values are caught, and they’re caught primarily from staff; being a role model is the most important responsibility of the teacher.

We model confidence perhaps in the way we deliver our lessons; communicate skilfully, potentially in the manner we seek to explain theoretical concepts in relevant and accessible ways; inquiry, in what we read ourselves, and the questions we ask of the pupils. Innovation could be caught through teachers always looking for better ways of doing something; resilience as we fail, re-evaluate, challenge ourselves to try again whilst open-mindedness can be found in the way we listen and care about pupils.

The difference between a professional and a technician is that the professional applies their understanding of the subject and pedagogy with heart rather than mechanically. If we are fostering classrooms where mutual respect, kindness and challenge, self-reliance and cooperation, disagreement and love flourish, then, in my opinion, we are allowing Education for Life to take place.

Our Education for Life virtues form a part of the larger picture of our pupils flourishing in life.

CHARACTER IS TAUGHT

Virtues and Education for Life values will be taught explicitly in chapels, assemblies and through Wellbeing, but character can be directly taught in the way that we plan and enable pupils to learn. Any teacher will apply a range of pedagogies, some of which will teach pupils Education for Life virtues as they are actively exercised, developed and allowed to fail in the engineered but safe environment that is the classroom.

Different topics in Chemistry lend themselves to different ways of teaching. Evidence is building on the effectiveness of discussion based learning, where moral and ethical use of chemical technologies in agriculture could be discussed; independent learning, where pupils have to think through the implications of combustion to ecologies; reflective learning, where pupils think about their actions; co-operative learning, in the form of practicals on group rates of reaction and group presentations on applications of nanoparticles; enquiry-based learning, where pupils are given more scope in researching and finding about the cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment of a favourite product, experiential learning where pupils are taken either physically or virtually on school trips to the chemical industries and virtue literacy, reading biographies of famous and infamous chemists of the past.

CHARACTER IS SOUGHT

Pupils can seek out character development opportunities through leadership and civic engagement in science. These could be our science leaders who role model to younger pupils what an Education for Life looks like by demonstrating insatiable curiosity. It could mean pupils engaging local prep and primary schools in fun demonstrations and practical experiments. It could be pupils demonstrating to their friends their chemistry skills through practical demonstrations and inter-school competitions or going on residential science trips where their character is tested and on display. It could see pupils spending the summer gaining work experience with junior doctors, or civil engineers or in a virology lab. It could mean running clubs and societies for younger pupils to inform and excite them about the latest developments in science. It could mean conducting their own research projects in school time so that pupils have something they have a passion for to bring to the classroom.

 

FLOURISHING IS THE AIM

Our Education for Life virtues, as important as they are, only form a part of the larger picture of our pupils flourishing in life. Much research is being done at the moment on what a flourishing life is. Academics have measured the impact of at least five domains: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, financial and material stability. Holistic schooling influences much of these. Domains like communal subjective well-being, spiritual well-being, vocation and suffering are also gaining wider acceptance. These will only be manifested over a lifetime, and cannot be measured directly, but can be evaluated in their infancy by a shrewd Tutor, teacher or Housemistress/Housemaster.

 

THE MEAL

So what relevance does Chemistry have to an Education for Life? Well everything and nothing. A great meal requires nutritious food beautifully served on a sturdy plate with adequate tools for use, and learning Chemistry needs appropriate pedagogies that develop the character traits that matter most as we search for scientific truth. A scientist of good character is a good scientist indeed.

Bon Appetit.

From the November 2022 issue of
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