United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a Thematic Framework for an Introductory Chemistry Curriculum

As part of a revision to the content and delivery of first-year chemistry instruction at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus, we have employed the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) as a thematic framework. This framework was introduced to promote the achievement of affective learning outcomes, including a systems thinking approach to exploring the relevance of first-year chemistry content and concepts to societal and global challenges. Through this framework, sets of course concepts, which are traditionally limited in their application to isolated textbook chapters, are demonstrated, through various in-class group activities, to have collective applications to the environmental and societal systems embodied by specific SDGs. Student attitudes to this framework and its associated activities were examined via a course-end survey and in-depth semistructured interviews. Student responses were generally positive, indicating an appreciation for the relevance of course concepts to the global challenges described by the SDGs, and for many students, the SDG-framed learning activities aided in their understanding of course concepts.