Laboratory Safety Teams as an Evolving Community of Practice: Exploring the How and Why

Abstract

Reports of laboratory damage, personal injury, and death have triggered increasing concern over the academic safety culture and the safety education of those pursuing studies in the chemical sciences. Student-led laboratory safety teams (LSTs) within academic institutions serve as a new and expanding informal, bottom-up approach to improving the academic safety culture and safety education of student researchers. Since 2018, a workshop has been run by the American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Health and Safety to support graduate students in the chemical sciences in establishing and growing LSTs of their own. Here, we examine how LSTs within the different academic institutions have evolved into a community of practice (CoP) through these workshops and why the members have engaged in growing this CoP. We determine the current stage of the LST CoP and what values the members created and experienced through the evaluation of artifacts from 14 workshops conducted from 2018 to 2022, semistructured interviews with student researchers running the workshops, and a guided focus group interview with the three primary student leaders of the workshops. We are sharing this analysis with the chemical education community to provide others with insights into experimental ways to improve the safety education of those pursuing studies in the chemical sciences.