Teaching Chemistry Around the World

Book excerpt: As teachers we often tend to expect other countries to teach chemistry in much the same way as we do, but educational systems differ widely. At Bielefeld University we started a project to analyse the approach to chemical education in different countries from all over the world: Teaching Chemistry around the World. 25 countries have participated in the project. The resulting country studies are presented in this book. This book may be seen as a contribution to make the structure of chemistry teaching in numerous countries more transparent and to facilitate communication between these countries. Especially in the case of the school subject chemistry, which is very unpopular on the one hand and occupies an exceptional position on the other hand – due to its relevance to jobs and everyday life and most notably due to its importance for innovation capacity and problem solving – we have to learn from each others’ educational systems.