Zafra Lerman is passionate about chemistry. She is also passionate about human rights. Marry the two, and you have an extraordinary woman whose teaching, for the past 28 years, has been inspired by her belief that it is every person’s right to have a good science education. This year’s Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Nyholm lecturer, Lerman, the founder of the department of science and mathematics at Columbia College Chicago in 1977 and now head of the Institute for Science Education and Science Communication at Columbia, is given this accolade for: 

her outstanding contributions to chemical education… in her use of visual and performing arts activities in teaching chemistry. She has made scientific literacy available to young people everywhere and brought the joys of science to many thousands of students.

Chemistry for non-scientists 

The Nyholm lecture was founded in 1973 in commemoration of Sir Ronald Nyholm, president of the RSC from 1968-70 and one of the founders of chemical education research. Giving her award address, Where chemistry meets art: the element connection, to an audience at Brighton University, in April, Lerman acknowledged the influence Nyholm had on her own teaching, which aims to inspire students by building on what is important and relevant to them. At Columbia, which is a liberal arts college, the students strive to be the poets, writers, artists, journalists, actors, film-makers and dancers of society, this inevitably means using art to deliver the science. On entry none of the students would want to spend any more time on a science class then they have to, most would have hated or feared science at high school. But by becoming ‘active learners’ in Lerman’s, Chemistry in daily life course, the majority leave understanding some chemistry and appreciate its relevance to their lives. A few get so switched on to chemistry after the ‘Zafra experience’, they leave the arts to study degree-level chemistry. 

‘My classes are very informal’, she told Education in Chemistry. ‘I get the students talking about what is important in their lives. I explain the chemistry, drawing on their everyday experiences, and then I ask them to show me how they understand the concepts anyway they want to’. The students use their different talents, often making use of their cultural backgrounds, to put across the chemical concepts. ‘I don’t write the scripts’, she continues, ‘they do. They wouldn’t learn any chemistry just by acting or dancing, but if they write the scripts they first need to understand the concepts’. Lerman is adamant that she never sacrifices the science, but strives to take the fear out of it by teaching the students at their own pace. 

In practice 

In one example, a young rock star, called Chlorine, speaks about how he was introduced to Carbon and Fluorine, and the three form a band called the CFCs. The band plays several gigs at different clubs – at Refrigerators and at Club Foam, until they go to Club Stratosphere, where they’re taking too much uv, and the band breaks up. But perhaps the most telling example is the rap song, Try to stop the air pollution, written and performed by Joe Ann Davis, an ex-convict. She was abused as a child, ended up in her mid-40s as a drug dealer, and was caught by the police carrying two guns. She was sentenced to six years in prison. Under a work-release programme Davis signed up to Columbia College to study for a music degree. The thought of having to go to a chemistry class scared her witless. ‘I asked her what she loved in life’, explained Lerman. ‘She loved to sing, to write songs. So that’s what she did’. Davis graduated with a degree in music and chemistry and went on to do a masters, and became an inspiration to her fellow inmates, some of whom wanted to pursue chemistry-related careers. She has been quoted as saying, ‘Using chemicals the wrong way nearly destroyed my life. A chemistry teacher and a chemistry class saved my life’. 

When you ask Lerman about assessment, you hit a chord. ‘I was a very good student’, she says, ‘but I hated to have to show all my knowledge in a written test that lasted for one hour. I would vomit, I hated it that much’. She recalls that many years ago a rabbi summarised the Torah by saying: ‘all that you hate to be done to you, don’t do it to your friends’. ‘And I consider my students my friends’, she says, ‘so I would never put them in a situation where they would have to show me in one hour all their chemistry in a written test. When I started teaching in 1977, I shared this experience with my students and they came up with the idea that they should be assessed by the teacher and the class on their interpretations and expression of the concepts. This way the whole class is involved in discussing the chemical concepts. And I thank my students for this, for teaching me how to teach’. 

Lerman’s methods have been extended to Chicago’s inner city schools. Feedback and evaluation suggest that students gain from her approach and show impressive improvement in their understanding of chemical concepts. Moreover, their aspirations towards career opportunities in science improve. 

Whence the passion? 

The passion that drives Lerman comes from her own life experience. Born in Israel during the British mandate, she remembers being left to her own devices as a young child. Her parents spent all their time ‘underground’, trying to rebuild the country. ‘They didn’t have time to push me into anything’, she recalls. ‘In any case if they did I would have rebelled and probably have been an elementary school dropout. The reason I became who I am today is because they left me to myself’. 

Lerman’s first love was mathematics. From a very young age she saw the beauty in mathematics. Her love of science was triggered when, one day as a child in Haifa, she turned a dial on a box and heard the sounds of ‘the voice of Jerusalem’. She asked everyone and anyone, where the sound was coming from. Her fascination with science had begun. For her 10th birthday, when her father asked her what she wanted, she replied ‘the recently translated Hebrew version of Einstein’s theories’. At the age of 17, after graduating from high school, she entered what she refers to as ‘the most important school I ever went to’ – the Israeli Armed Forces. By the time she had finished her two-year mandatory stint, she had a different view of the world, and she had learned a lot through the many science courses she had taken. Chemistry, which until then had seemed boring, was beginning to look more attractive. After ‘calculating’ her situation – she was married with a small child – she decided to pursue a degree in chemistry because this science would offer her the biggest variety of job opportunities. 

Lerman went on to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology where she did a BSc, majoring in chemistry, followed by a masters. She then moved to the Weizmann Institute of Science to do a doctorate. She did post-doctoral research at Cornell University in New York. At Cornell she became involved and interested in scientific freedom and human rights. She travelled to some of the most dangerous places in the world to help the plight of dissidents, in the Soviet Union and China for example. ‘The most important thing is to keep all communication channels open – you can’t change anything by boycotting institutions and people, like the AUT [Association of University Teachers] did here recently – that’s just plain dumb’, she says. Back in the US, she was particularly concerned that the African Americans and the Hispanic people were under represented in science. ‘They weren’t getting the best teachers to succeed in life. I felt that their human rights were being abused by not giving them the right education to be able to enjoy the world of science. So I decided that I would teach and have them all love science’. In 1977 she went to Columbia College, and the rest as they say is history. 

Kathryn Roberts