This is in response to Mike Weber's query.
I have dealt with your problem of bored students in our general biol labs. It
was a pretty pitiful lab to begin with and the students did not receive any
lectures on plants. I taught a plants useful course this spring and let me try
to make sense of my thoughts:
I think students are rarely able to connect botany facts with the real world
(the relevance thing) and thus it becomes very boring to them early on. In my
plants useful course I tried to teach them some botany facts as it related to
the useful aspects I was teaching. 90% were non-majors and I had excellent
feedback from students about the topics and the ease of learning and the
interest level. Example: people need sugar/starch to survive. Plants make sugar
via photosynthesis (give the very basics of hte process, not really detailed-
that can come later once you get them interested in why and how it relates to
them personally). Plants also use this sugar/starch in respiration - do
comparisons to animal respiration. I also discussed where and why plants store
starch and how we humans have taken advantage of that - all of our staple foods
are seeds or root crops (source-sink concepts). It is very easy to bring in
morphology here - roots, shoots, vascular system, leaves, flowers and seeds....
Another example: metabolism- discuss the various products humans use (resin,
gum, latex, starch, sugar, alkaloids, vitamins, medicines, etc. and the basics
of how and why and where they are produced in plants.
So how can this be incorporated into a lab? These labs don't necessarily have to
be experimental. I brought in a lot of various household products for them to
look at ( but the students could do this as part of the lab - extra credit or
something?) We tested ice creams with and without plant gums for taste,
smoothness and meltability. We made paper out of various plants - relate it to
fibers in the plant. You could do starch tests on various plant parts or food
items. We made potpourri sachets with smelly plants from the greenhouse -
related it to the alkaloids, etc produced and their possible functions in hte
plant. You could have them read some articles about taxol and the pacific yew
and discuss some issues - AIDS, research behind drug production, conservation.
Well, I hope this gives you and others? some ideas for botany labs.
Beth Frieders
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Elizabeth M. Frieders The great pleasure in life
Department of Plant Biology is doing what people say
University of Minnesota you cannot do.
220 BioSciCenter, 1445 Gortner Avenue
St.Paul, MN 55108-1095 -- Walter Bagehot
Phone: 612-625-7740
Fax: 612-625-1738
email: fried009 at maroon.tc.umn.edu
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