Poetry in equilibrium? Chemistry course brings out creativity

Crack open a poetry anthology and you'll find odes to the seasons, the emotions, even nightingales and the west wind, but rarely have poets been moved to immortalize chemical concepts in verse. Recently, though, students in an innovative new chemistry course at U-M did just that.

Encouraged to employ forms of expression not typically utilized in chemistry classes, students Jeff Atkinson, Joe Donley and Eric Frey used poetry, images and interpretive dance to explain the concept of equilibrium to their classmates.

"We were surprised to get an answer in the form of a poem," says Associate Professor of Chemistry Mark Banaszak Holl, who teaches the Studio 130 Chemistry course with postdoctoral fellow Amy Gottfried and a team of graduate student instructors. "Not only was their work creative, but it also demonstrated a really good understanding of the material."

The course, which is designed to accommodate diverse learning styles, emphasizes teamwork and intersperses mini-lectures with demonstrations and hands-on laboratory exercises. "The typical university class is 50 minutes of lecture, but research shows that people don't maintain attention effectively for more than 10 minutes at a time," Banaszak Holl says. "In the studio course, students change tasks every 10 to 15 minutes, and the tasks are carefully selected for much more effective learning."

For example, a unit on the periodic table—the grid of chemical symbols and related numbers that hangs in every general chemistry classroom—starts with a demonstration, then segues into an activity period in which students are free to play around with samples of various elements, gauging properties such as hardness and finding out what happens when the elements react with water. "Then we have the students create their own tables, which helps them to understand how the elements are organized," Gottfried says.

Early indications are that students taught this way are better at observing and explaining phenomena than students taught in traditional lecture and lab sessions, says Banaszak Holl, and they perform just as well on other measures of comprehension.

"The multiple teaching styles implemented and learning styles accommodated by the studio teaching method have been realized thanks to the excellent development work of the whole team involved in the project," Banaszak Holl says. "After all of their hard work, it is wonderful to see creative, interesting answers that simply would never be produced by the students in a conventional lecture course."

In addition to Banaszak Holl and team leader Gottfried, the Studio 130 team includes graduate student instructors Pascale Leroueil, Kendra Reid and Shaelah Reidy. Students Ryan Sweeder, Jessica Hessler, Jeff Bartolin, Ben Reynolds and Ian Stewart helped develop the course, and chemistry professor Brian Coppola provided helpful advice.

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