course
From: Allan Strand <stranda at cofc.edu>
Date: 11 Nov 1999 12:41:59 -0500
Message-ID: <86g0ydapso.fsf at linum.cofc.edu>
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Hi all,
I have posted this message to both the plant-ed list and the biolab
list. If you subscribe to both, I apologize in advance for the duplication.
Kind of a long message/question, but I wanted to make my motivation clear.
If you don't want to read my rambling, scroll down to the section
entitled "Question" and ignore the rest.
Background:
Milieu and Clientele:
I currently teach a 300-level course entitled simply "botany".
This is one of a list of courses that all B.S. bio majors must
choose from to satisfy a "plant-oriented" course requirement. The
other courses include plant taxonomy, plant physiology, plant
ecology, and phycology. Students that enroll in these courses are
only required to have completed our introductory biology sequence
(two 100-level courses). This preparation characterizes about half
of the students I encounter. The other half are planning on
graduating in the year they take the course. Our department has
about 900 majors, 50% of which are probably pre-med and only about
5% of which have any stated interest in plants. The rest are
mainly marine biology students.
It is not really surprising then, that nearly all the students that
I encounter in my class range from uninterested to downright
hostile to plant sciences. Many of you can probably tell similar
stories.
My particular course orientation:
I have homed in on a "plant diversity" theme for the course with
occasional forays into physiology (in particular I spend some time
on photosynthesis because it will be the only time most students in
the class get it in detail) and anatomy. I take a traditional
botanical view of plant diversity and include fungi and several
phyla of protists in the course as well as true members of Kingdom
Plantae.
I feel that I have more or less succeeded in developing a
combination of content and style in lecture that stimulates fairly
high levels of attendance and student participation. I tend to
include a lot of references to economic uses of the organisms that
we cover; it seems to get even the most recalcitrant students
somewhat interested.
Problem:
I feel however, that many of my labs (13-14 a semester, 3 hours
each) lack meaning for the students.
There are some exceptions: 1) I take a couple of field trips every
semester, and all of the students seem to take home valuable
messages from these trips. 2) I run one physiological lab where I
have students design experiments to examine at factors that
influence the rate of photosynthesis in leaves (I use leaf disks as
the response variable). 3) all students do an independent project
loosely oriented around the ESA stomatal density lab
exercises. This project is intended to focus their attention that
much variation exists within plant species and that this variation
could be influenced by the environment.
For most of the labs, however, students spend time observing
characteristics of organisms, be they fungi, protists or plants.
They really are not interested in these labs and are totally
motivated by finishing up as soon as possible. I feel that somehow
many of these labs could be rearranged to become more inquiry based
so that they motivate the students to learn the material in a
different way. I am at a loss, however, as to how to actually make
this happen.
Question:
How do any of you implement rigorous question oriented approaches
to upper-level plant anatomy and plant diversity labs? Are there
published collections of potential approaches? lab-exercises?
Web-sites? Am I expecting too much to believe that this kind of
thing is possible?
I appreciate any responses, and of course if I collect a lot of useful
information, I will post a summary...
Cheers,
A.
--
Allan E. Strand stranda at cofc.edu, http://linum.cofc.edu
Department of Biology Phone: (843) 953-8085
College of Charleston Fax: (843) 953-5453
Charleston, SC 29424
