EDENLAQ in the Communication Circuit of Chemistry Teaching

Abstract

On these pages we begin the second issue of volume 29 of our Association's magazine. It is very gratifying for us to inform you of new achievements of Education in Chemistry since it has been included in different national and international databases, supporting the continuous work to improve the quality of our journal. This year, EDENLAQ has been evaluated and accepted to be included in AmeliCA (Open Knowledge for Latin America and the Global South), Basic Nucleus of Argentine Scientific Journals (CAICYT-CONICET), CIRC (Integrated Classification of Scientific Journals) and ROAD (Directory of Open Access Journals).

As one of the most widely used forms of communication, scientific journals are being reviewed by the scientific community within the debates on the importance of open access to knowledge and indexing systems. The other classic way of publicizing news and controversies around knowledge is made up of "scientific meetings" since they constitute a space for the circulation and exchange of ideas and novel currents on research processes, interests and needs in different communities, situations and contexts (Algañaraz Soria, 2022).

In this line, we support our Journal in the conviction of the central nature of chemistry as Brown, LeMay and Bursten (1998 and later editions) had already enunciated in their renowned textbook given their important, undeniable and essential contributions to many other areas. disciplines that have led the world to be what it is today. Without fear of being extremely reductionist, we dare to say, for example: without chemistry, there would be no AI. This implies, obviously, extending this recognition to the community of researchers and teachers who work in this field, producing chemical knowledge, knowledge about teaching and learning chemistry and awakening scientific vocations in a new generation of young people permeated by great transformations. cultural (Pariser, 2017).

One of the ways to contribute to this communicative circuit of chemical knowledge is our classic review "Congresses, Conferences, Seminars from Here and There...", which not only propose a calendar to schedule upcoming scientific meetings of possible interest to our readers, but, and above all, we try to offer a window to navigate between the new scenarios that the pages of these congresses present to us and, later, their abstract books, to recognize the thematic lines in progress, the current trends, the personalities that participate and all the vanguard in these themes.

We open another window with an initiative for this second half of the year 2023, on October 6 a curious aspect will take place since the date when it is written as 06-10-23 coincides with the number values of Avogadro's number. On that date, a conference entitled “6·1023. Didactics and History of Physics and Chemistry: from concepts to learning situations" organized by the Specialized Group in Didactics and History of Physics and Chemistry common to the Royal Spanish Societies of Physics and Chemistry together with the Polytechnic University from Madrid (Reserve a very special day: 10/6/23, 2023). From the Editorial Team of our Magazine, we call on the chemistry teachers of our region to join in organizing actions to revisit Avogadro's number and the conceptual importance that it possesses.

This issue of EDENLAQ contains five articles and a review that address different topics related to the teaching and learning of Chemistry in Latin America.

Two original articles are published in the Research in Chemistry Didactics section. In the first of them, Zorrilla and Mazzitelli invite us to revisit one of the spaces that differentiates our work, teaching in the chemistry laboratory, through a study and analysis of the practices that were developed in different subjects by university teachers. in Argentina. On the other hand, Dos Santos, Saldivar and Kornel, based on a study on dropout data and shelling of a Chemistry subject at an Argentine University, make a didactic proposal to address this problem.

In the following section, Innovation for the Teaching of Chemistry, two original articles that recover teaching practices during the COVID-19 pandemic are compiled. Acosta and Hernández present a proposal for the evaluation of the learning of students in the last year of a Technical High School upon returning to face-to-face from a project with a STEAM approach (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) . On the other hand, Ils and Hernández present a didactic unit for the teaching of the experimental laws of the gaseous state of matter, carried out in a second year of a Secondary School.

Finally, in the section Chemistry Education in Argentina and the World, Mesa Briñas, Blanco Gómez and Addine Fernández invite us to reflect on the importance of the specific technical language of Chemical Sciences based on a study on the way in which in Cuba names the magnitude quantity of substance: “mole” and “mol”. Finally, the report of new events, seminars and congresses that Dr. Farré shares for our community is included.

To end this editorial, we call on our readers to make significant contributions to our Magazine, which in January 2024 will publish the first issue of EDENLAQ's 30th volume, as well as to join in the activities that ADEQRA organizes next year as celebration of our first thirty volumes. In particular, we encourage you to send contributions that recover those aspects of our professional practice in the return to full face-to-face. What did we learn in the pandemic? Did we go back to zero or were we able to capitalize on something of everything we learned or experienced? How has the Teaching of Chemistry been transformed in our context? In addition, those articles referring to the history of EDENLAQ for the Chemistry Education in Argentina and the World section will be especially considered.

Finally, we have the opportunity to give you a scoop and invite you to be attentive to the first circular of the XX Meeting of Educators in Chemistry of our Association (Figure 1). It will be held in virtual mode from November 27 to December 1, 2023 under the organization of the Department of Chemistry of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Health Sciences National University of Patagonia San Juan Bosco, Comodoro Rivadavia Headquarters, together with ADEQRA. The communications accepted for their defense may be extended to undergo evaluation for publication in our Journal during the years 2024 and 2025 after completing the editorial process.

We hope to meet virtually at the XX REQ.