As a chemistry professor at USC Lancaster, Li Cai encountered a common challenge: ensuring students with varied academic backgrounds could fully engage with and understand science coursework.
Cai teaches Chemistry 102, a fundamental science course that many students, including non-STEM majors, take to meet core course prerequisites. Especially in recent years, students coming into the classroom without any chemistry foundations have struggled to meet learning outcomes.
“As a professor and chemistry major, these are straightforward concepts. There is no need to explain,” says Cai. “You’re in this field, and it’s very hard to create something out of the box. But students are actually outside of the box because they haven’t gotten into your field yet.”
That’s why he reached out to Sahar Aghasafari to find another way to connect with his students.
Aghasafari, assistant professor of art and design at USC Lancaster, has long been interested in interdisciplinary work, so deciding to collaborate on a project combining art and science was natural. Together, Cai and Aghasafari secured funding through the Research Initiative for Summer Engagement (RISE), a program designed to support USC system faculty, and the ChemArtistry project was born.
They decided to start small, exploring one of the very first concepts taught in Li’s introductory Chem 102 courses, isomers, through the medium of graphic stories. A shorter version of the graphic novel, this art form presents a narrative visually over the course of a few panels.
After creating the graphic stories, along with video poems and voice animations explaining the concept of isomers, Aghasafari and her research assistant, Mark Malloy, came to Cai’s class to discuss the materials and the process involved in creating them. It’s been received well.
“When you bring images and text together to tell a specific story, it’s not just engaging but also helping students through visualization. A lot of the students prefer to see the visual content rather than just numbers and letters,” says Aghasafari. “It may be challenging to bring art into a STEM discipline, but it’s a time saver for the future because it helps students better understand the content.”
Looking to the future, Cai and Aghasafari hope to involve more chemistry students in creating their own visual representations of scientific concepts, allowing them to engage more deeply with the content and foster artistic knowledge.
In the meantime, the pair has submitted a graphic story on protein structure to the Journal of Chemical Education for review and revision. Their eventual goal is to bring their interdisciplinary collaboration into high school science classrooms to lay a solid chemistry foundation before students reach college, a proposal that high school teachers and principals have embraced.
“An alternative or better way to view organic concepts is very important to me,” says Cai. “With the fast pace of AI in learning and teaching, this is the best timing for us to embrace these concepts and incorporate them into traditional teaching.”