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How to learn from a disaster

A derailed freight train photographed from above. There is a visible fire and black smoke billows up.

Credit: Associated Press

The Norfolk Southern freight train burning in East Palestine, Ohio, Feb. 4, 2023. The first portion of Dickson-Karn’s lessons focusses on those first days.

On Feb. 3, 2023, Nicole Dickson-Karn couldn’t look away from the television. A Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous chemicals had just derailed and caught fire about 20 km from Dickson-Karn’s hometown in eastern Ohio, where her mother still lives. “It was impossible for me not to pay attention,” she says.

Dickson-Karn, an analytical chemistry teaching professor at the Ohio State University, began doing what any scientist might—she began digging through the data to make sense of the disaster.

As she collected air, water, and soil sample data posted by the US Environmental Protection Agency and Norfolk Southern in real time, Dickson-Karn realized that “this is an analytical chemistry problem.” So she decided to use the rich heap of information to craft a learning experience for the undergraduate students in her instrumental analysis lab.

The three-part case study Dickson-Karn built follows the actual timeline of the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment and puts students in the shoes of EPA officials tasked with using real disaster data for short- and long-term decision-making. Dickson-Karn describes the program in a paper published in November in the Journal of Chemical Education (2024, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00831). Her goal was to show students a real-world example of the utility of analytical chemistry in an active learning environment.

Dickson-Karn is just the latest professor to build educational resources using real-world examples. Proponents of the approach say that using case studies in the classroom centers students in their own learning, allowing them to acquire knowledge through active participation and collaboration. The method places topics like analytical chemistry in a broader context, an approach called systems thinking.

“For me, systems thinking is about thinking holistically and big picture,” says Glenn Hurst, a professor of green chemistry education in the Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence at the University of York. “So moving away from thinking about topics disparately but rather how they’re connected.”

Educators have increasingly used systems thinking to teach subjects like green chemistry, which focuses on sustainability in chemistry as it intersects with political, social, and economic factors. Hurst says case studies are especially useful when interrogating those intersections.

Case studies can be “relatable to students, either in terms of what they see in the news or what’s happening around them,” Hurst says. “That can both extrinsically and intrinsically motivate students to engage with the subject matter and hopefully learn better as a result.”

Dickson-Karn had experience using case studies with her students before she decided to build her own. While looking for ways to keep her hybrid analytical lab interesting during the COVID-19 pandemic, she came across Eli Fahrenkrug’s paper describing a case study for undergraduate analytical students designed around the water crisis in Flint, Michigan (J. Chem. Ed. 2020, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.9b00669). She decided to give it a try with her students.

The modules kept students engaged during an otherwise challenging year of online instruction and lab modifications due to the pandemic, Dickson-Karn says. “The Flint study showed me how powerful case studies can be in learning chemistry.”

Fahrenkrug, now an associate professor at Colorado College, was struck by the events in Flint as a graduate student in analytical chemistry at the University of Michigan. “I would listen to Michigan Public radio every morning and just hear how the crisis was evolving,” he says.

Fahrenkrug says it was hard for him to fathom how something could occur that left so many people drinking water with elevated lead levels. “It felt like an easy problem to solve,” he says. After moving to Colorado College in 2017, Fahrenkrug knew he wanted to incorporate the Flint crisis into his teaching. “I designed the courses around the question, ‘How could this happen?’” he says.

The resulting case study was developed with Paul Buckley, who at the time was director of the Butler Center, which fosters antiracism and diversity at Colorado College. The study incorporates environmental justice topics along with analytical techniques like systematic treatment of equilibrium.

“Running the Flint study in my course gave me the impetus and knowledge needed to design a case study on the East Palestine train derailment,” Dickson-Karn says. She adds that she thought Fahrenkrug incorporated environmental justice issues so well that she was inspired to broach similar topics in her own study.

In front of a creek is a sign saying Keep Out, testing and cleaning in progress.

Credit: AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File

Clean up of a creek in East Palestine, Ohio, March 8, 2023.

Dickson-Karn’s East Palestine case study connects analytical chemistry topics to students' immediate surroundings. Many of her students are from Ohio, so analyzing a disaster in their home state “gives them a bit of buy-in to the problem,” she says. “It lets them interact better with this problem-based learning.”

The first portion of the case study is set during the 3 days after the derailment of the Norfolk Southern freight train, which carried vinyl chloride and other hazardous chemicals. Taking the role of EPA agents, the students use safety data sheets to assess the human health and environmental hazards of the chemical and possible side products—like phosgene and hydrogen chloride gas—that could be released to the air as vinyl chloride burns. They make plans for chemical testing and decide which analytical techniques to use for it.

The second and third sessions, set during the weeks and months after the disaster, focus on air, water, and soil testing after the vent and burn of the vinyl chloride, which left a cloud of black smoke over the disaster area.

Dickson-Karn says she doesn’t care about whether or not the students' analyses and testing plans match with those of the EPA. The lesson isn’t about students being accurate, she says, but rather about allowing their chemistry knowledge to guide their decision-making. This approach models the realities of chemical assessment after a disaster, as EPA officials on the ground are working with just their expertise and limited information.

Deepta Paramasamy, a research affiliate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who attended Dickson-Karn’s class as an undergraduate, says the open-endedness of the case study was a challenge. But not having all the answers “was important for us as researchers,” she says. “We were required to formulate our own thoughts and questions and experimental plan with the information we had available to us.”

As a final assignment, the students write an opinion editorial on the successes and failures of the actual sampling and testing that the EPA and local officials conducted. Dickson-Karn says she wants students “to see how important what they’re learning in our chemistry courses is in society and to be able to communicate that importance with non-scientists.”

Dickson-Karn piloted the case study during the 2022 academic year for her quantitative analysis course and, after workshopping it more, ran it in her instrumental analysis course the following fall. She says she’ll continue using it until she gets tired of it or decides to develop a newer real-world example. “I’m always looking for ideas or ways to keep the lab fresh,” Dickson-Karn says. She also hopes to modify the derailment case study for a general chemistry level.

Fahrenkrug has been teaching variations of his Flint water crisis case study in upper-level and general chemistry classes at Colorado College for 7 years. He says that some things have changed—concepts like environmental racism are now less foreign to students—but that engagement has held steady. The case study “makes chemistry feel relevant and tangible and impactful to humans,” he says.

This relevance can help students better engage with chemistry and possibly encourage them to continue their chemical education and pursue a related career. “For some people, theoretical work can be difficult to connect with,” Dickson-Karn says.

That’s something Paramasamy says was her experience as a student, when she found it hard to envision how work in the lab translated to the outside world. During her undergraduate years, this apparent separation often left her questioning her choice of chemistry as a major.

That disconnect changed when she participated in Dickson-Karn’s lessons. “This case study helped me realize that the work I’m doing could be very important,” Paramasamy says. “It helped me rediscover my passion for chemistry.”

Dickson-Karn hopes that educators will continue to show students how chemistry intersects with society. Fahrenkrug agrees and takes it a step further. “I think a lot of chemistry is inherently political,” he says. “To pretend that chemistry or science is fully separate from power and equity is a little disingenuous to ourselves as scientists, but also to our students.”

Bec Roldan is a multimedia science journalist based in New York City.

Chemical & Engineering News

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