An overview of portuguese chemical engineering undergraduate laboratories

Abstract

The UNESCO’s World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century, Vision and Action (1998) states in its paragraph “Innovative educational approaches: critical thinking and creativity”: “[…] New pedagogical and didactical approaches should be accessible and promoted in order to facilitate the acquisition of skills, competencies and abilities for communication, creative and critical analysis, independent thinking and team work […]”. The importance of teaching laboratories for students to acquire competencies and abilities especially in creative and critical analysis and teamwork is recognized. On the other hand it is generally recognized in all the EU countries that undergraduate labs are generally badly equipped, badly taught, badly organized and high budget consumers. To make things worse, the traditional education labs consume lots of reactants, produce lots of environmentally aggressive effluents, consume lots of students' time and have a modest output. Under this framework what should be changed? Would it be easy to do? Or are we condemned to live with bad labs and bad lab classes? Isolated efforts of laboratory professors and head of departments have been tried within each Portuguese University. Now it's time to involve all partners, head of departments, course directors, laboratory professors and students, of all schools, and make an effort to conquer a quantitative improvement of the undergraduate laboratories and dynamize an inter-school collaboration. The first step in this direction will be done, precisely, at this congress. Five experiences on main five Portuguese Universities (FEUP, IST, UA, UM, UC and UNL) are described, giving a picture of the effort being played in these institutions to improve the experimental education.