Insight into the Chemistry of Teaching

Ned Lindholm breaks down barriers to learning science while navigating the classroom and the world while blind

By Peta Owens-Liston

With dark glasses matching a wave of dark hair, Dr. Ned Lindholm places his white cane on the lip of the whiteboard. It is the first day in his chemistry class.

“Let’s talk about the 500-pound gorilla in the room,” he says, his deep baritone voice resonating. “I’m blind.”

“This means I will not see you nod your head, or raise your hand, or looking confused. You need to verbally speak up — feel free to interrupt me.”

As part of his pedagogy, Lindholm encourages his students to ask questions and seek out his help. Then he starts chipping away at the students’ intimidation of the subject, using an Albert Einstein quote to help eliminate barriers to learning:

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

He tells the students the jargon and the long words they will hear are “just an attempt to make us sound smarter than we are” for concepts that are quite simple once you start applying them.

He sees his role as part teacher, part motivator, and part coach, and he aims to demystify chemistry, a complex subject, making it accessible and relevant for his students.

“I think we too often defeat ourselves in our mind before we’ve even given something a chance,” says Lindholm, who has been an adjunct faculty member at the College since 2016. “I don’t want any of these students giving up on a career dream because they give up on themselves in this class.”

Lindholm teaches Elementary Chemistry, in which many of the students are pursuing healthcare professions, and General Education Chemistry, which introduces students from a variety of backgrounds to chemistry. In both classes, he connects chemistry concepts with

scenarios they will find in a healthcare profession or just in everyday life. He tells students to go home and look at what is in their toothpaste or on their kitchen shelves to match it to the nomenclature that comes up in class like fluorine or sodium bicarbonate.

I THINK WE TOO OFTEN DEFEAT OURSELVES IN OUR MIND BEFORE WE’VE EVEN GIVEN SOMETHING A CHANCE.

Lindholm’s teaching style involves a lot of verbal interaction. His expectation is that his students take a collaborative approach. “I don’t just work through a problem and solve it for them — I ask, what do we need to do here? They come back with something, so I say let’s try it and see what happens. Nope, it doesn’t work and this is why. Any other ideas?”

“He is able to visualize these high concept things in his head and helps us understand them or writes formulas on the board and talks us through them,” says student Cooper Beckstead, a pre-nursing major. “He is just a really knowledgeable teacher, who is also understanding when we need flexibility.”

Cooper adds that everyone can benefit by engaging with people who have different perspectives, for whatever reason. “To imagine what it is like for Dr. Lindholm to navigate the world opens my mind more.”

Exploring New Ways to Teach Science to Those without Sight

Lindholm honed his teaching skills in his former career as a project scientist for Jacobsen Engineering, where he also contracted with the military and taught soldiers chemistry-related topics. “It was a tough audience,” recalls Lindholm. “But engagement levels jumped significantly once I drew it to what they might encounter in deployment, especially regarding chemicals used to make homemade explosives.” Lindholm also taught chemistry while in grad school.

In 2013, an experiment went awry, resulting in an explosion that destroyed Lindholm's eyesight and damaged his ear drums and right hand. “I took the [rehab] challenges one thing at a time, otherwise it would have felt insurmountable,” says Lindholm. “I had only one option and that was to get better.” After rehab and a yearlong training to adjust to being blind through the state’s Services for The Blind and Visually Impaired, Lindholm asked himself, “What can I still do?” This led him to SLCC.

It also led him into advocacy work for the blind through the National Federation of the Blind. The organization’s tagline: “blindness is not the characteristic that defines you or your future.” “This is exactly what I needed to hear after my injury,” expresses Lindholm.

When he realized science education for youth who are blind was nearly nonexistent, it infuriated him, and he dove into figuring out new ways to run experiments to teach

science without sight by focusing on tangible elements like temperature changes or an inflating balloon as it fills with gas.

Back in his classroom on SLCC’s Taylorsville Redwood Campus, Lindholm asks his students to name the two types of energy. One answers, “Kinetic,” and 30 seconds later another student responds with “Potential energy.”

“And what is kinetic energy?” projects Lindholm. He looks expectantly out at the students. He waits. He trusts that they want to learn and that they see him as an advocate who will help them move closer to achieving their educational goals — especially if chemistry is a tough subject for them. A student quietly utters, “Motion,” then louder: “Kinetic energy is energy in motion.”