Winner: 2023 Early Career Prize for Excellence in Secondary and Further Education
Dr Cameron Carpenter-Warren
Beauchamp City Sixth Form
For demonstrating passion and enthusiasm for chemistry, as well as inspiration in communicating these to students, and supporting them to explore the subject in greater depth.
Cameron teaches A-level chemistry full-time. He has also been tasked with challenging the students at his school above and beyond the A-level curriculum. To do this, he has established ties with local universities to give students the experience of using specialist techniques and equipment not available in school and hear live talks about cutting-edge science from experts in the field.
Cameron has also designed and resourced a custom course, which he delivers in a series of weekly after-school sessions. Each session includes a short talk about some fun and current chemistry, not covered in the national curriculum, and then a problem-solving session based on the topic. The aim of these sessions is to motivate students by showing them the amazing range of chemistry happening right now, as well as giving them the opportunity to develop valuable lateral thinking skills that will help them succeed in interviews and national Olympiad competitions.
Cameron has written and resourced two interactive murder mysteries, where students must interview suspects and order and interpret analytical tests, over a period of weeks, to identify the murderer(s). As well as making learning fun, these activities emphasise the real-world application of knowledge, showing students how chemistry can be used as a tool to solve complex problems.
Biography
Cameron grew up in Devon, where he spent the majority of his childhood as an elite open-water swimmer/biathlete. He completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Loughborough University, where he spent his free time learning and competing in various martial arts.
Cameron then undertook a PhD in structural chemistry at the University of St Andrews, where he became heavily involved in teaching, demonstrating, curriculum design and education-focused research. During this time, he was also a sensei (instructor) for the students' Jujitsu club and a door supervisor at the student union. He moved to Nottingham to complete his PGCE and was offered a job teaching chemistry at Beauchamp City Sixth Form, where he has taught ever since.
Our head of department makes sure to praise and highlight our strengths. He also works hard to find ways to minimise staff workload without sacrificing student outcomes. He encourages individuality in teaching style and abhors standardisation for standardisation's sake.
Dr Cameron Carpenter-Warren
Q&A
In a few sentences, how does it feel to receive this prize and be recognised by colleagues for your contribution to chemistry education?
I feel incredibly lucky to have colleagues and students who are thoughtful enough to put me up for such an award and say nice things about me.
To have my efforts recognised by the RSC feels great, and it has definitely flooded me with a fresh wave of motivation at this key time when the marking is piling up and the nights are drawing in!
What would be your advice to educators who are working with colleagues going above and beyond, but are yet to nominate them for an RSC Education prize?
Nominating a colleague is a great way to show them how much they're valued in your department!
How did you first become interested in chemistry or science?
I can't think of one event or time that set me on a path of science. I think I've just always been pretty curious. My mum always complains that from a very young age, I would disassemble her work pens and other gadgets, before becoming disinterested and leaving her the task of reassembly.
I've been fortunate enough to have some very good teachers. When I was in year 7, I had a passionate science teacher, Mr Carter, who would occasionally take a lesson or two to teach us whatever took his fancy. I'm certain that even back then, the Chornobyl nuclear disaster and the politics of drug classification were not on the KS3 curriculum!
I all but flipped a coin between studying product design or chemistry at university, and I think my appreciation for chemistry and its importance in technology and wider society has grown steadily since then.
Who or what has inspired you to have a role in education?
I was financially strong-armed into demonstrating during my PhD and I immediately really enjoyed it. It was a few hours away from my research, just walking around a room chatting to undergrads about chemistry, reminding them to turn on the water supply to their condensers.
After that, I tried to demonstrate as much as I could! My supervisor was incredibly supportive, and the inorganic lab convener at the time was really good - I learnt a lot from working with him.
Despite all this, I was still planning on doing a postdoc, but my PhD funding ran out in March 2020, and with the lockdowns, any tentative arrangements I had in academia evaporated, and I lost my other 0-hour contract positions.
I had a think, applied for a PGCE, and here I stand three years later with zero regrets!
What motivates you?
For a multitude of reasons, I believe that chemistry is a subject worthy of study, and I have an inherent drive to share my knowledge of it.
I have the fortune of working with an incredibly driven group of young people who are constantly challenging me to think about chemistry in different ways. They make it easy for me to go the extra mile. Whatever additional sessions I put on or resources I make, they engage enthusiastically and make it clear they appreciate the effort.
I also believe I work in the best chemistry department! Our head of department makes sure to praise and highlight our strengths. He also works hard to find ways to minimise staff workload without sacrificing student outcomes. He encourages individuality in teaching style and abhors standardisation for standardisation's sake.
The result is an experienced group of chemistry teachers who take pride in what they do and are always striving to try out new pedagogies and improve upon their practice. We regularly share our teaching problems and try to offer one another solutions.
How can good science education support solving global challenges?
The study of science provides us with a knowledge and understanding of how the physical world around us works. The more we know about it, the more we can appreciate its intricacies and beauties as we go about our daily lives.
The more we understand at a young age, the greater our drive becomes to learn more, and this results in a passionate group of adults who want to discover things about the world that nobody has ever discovered before! These people will work to solve global issues not because they feel they ought to, or because the job pays more than any other, but because they have an inherent drive to do so.
We should encourage and support these people at every step of their journey.
How are the chemical sciences making the world a better place?
I'm typing a response to this question on my laptop, looking at its bright OLED screen, typing with its robust, lightweight polymer keypad, sending signals to its silicon motherboard - all powered by a lithium-ion battery.
If I were to sit here and try to list every product, field of study, industry and group of people that has been enhanced by our knowledge of chemistry - I would die a failure.
Perhaps the best way of looking at it is to consider some key metrics: medicine, education, technology, leisure, transport, sanitation, and public safety.
Think where we are with these right now and then cast your mind back 100 years and compare. Penicillin was yet to be discovered, a good education was afforded to so few, and fingerprint and DNA databases were a long way off! I would argue that knowledge and developments in chemistry hold a lion's share of the credit for these stark improvements we see today.
It is true that some of these developments have themselves created problems, but I strongly believe that, again, it will be advances in chemistry that will facilitate the solving of these.
Who or what has supported you in your career as an educator?
I trained to be a teacher during one of the lockdown years, and in retrospect, I think the University of Nottingham did an excellent job of it. I was not introduced to anything new, conceptually, during staff training during my first two years of teaching.
I had a very talented teacher as my mentor at my first training school who was incredibly patient with me and gave really effective feedback.
I now work in a department of experienced, kind, supportive chemistry teachers. They have all supported me and helped me become the teacher I am now. We regularly get feedback from students about how friendly, organised and approachable we are as a department, and I'm sure this leads to improved student outcomes, as well as making for a great working environment!
What is your favourite element?
Oganesson. Although too short-lived to be good for any chemistry, oganesson aesthetically completes (for now) the periodic table, rounding off hundreds of years of element discovery and rationalisation.
More importantly, though, I enjoy the modern history of element discovery and particularly the unanimous vote to name element 118 after Uri Organessian - by both American and Russian scientists.
This gesture, and indeed the fruitful collaboration which preceded it, shows that science transcends any nationalism, political ideology and geographical location. Science can, and should, bring passionate people from all backgrounds together in the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit of all humankind.