Botanical Education

Here are some of the projects I have been working on to help make learning about botany fun! Please feel free to use them in your own classrooms. I welcome feedback or questions.

• The Pet Plant Project – students grow a seed to reproductive age and relate classroom topics to the changes they see in their own plant over the semester.
• #adaywithoutplants – a social media challenge where students try to survive 24 hours without using any plant derived products (oxygen being an exception!).
• Rooting Students in their Botanical History – a series of 10 educational modules for use in high school and college classrooms that teaches students about the importance of plants and herbaria.
• Understanding plant meristems – students frequently struggle to understand how shoot and root apical meristems work. Using blocks students structure meristems to see how new cells are produced
• General Botany lectures – recorded during the pandemic, I use a lightboard to draw and explain fundamental botanical concepts.
• Forensic botany activity – students solve crimes using botanical clues.

I am inspired by experts and mentors that truly care about improving botanical education. Please see the links below for more teaching resources. 

• Dr. Lena Struwe’s Botany Depot
• Dr. Chris Martine’s YouTube Series “Plants Are Cool, Too”
• Dr. Anna Monfils and collaborators at BLUE: Biodiversity Literacy in Undergraduate Education