From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2020.
On the 16th, 23rd, and 30th of January, and the 6th of February, a botany after-school workshop was led by Gabe Johnson, Liz Zimmer, Richie Hodel, Mónica Carlsen-Krause, Shruti Dube, Steven Canty, Erika Gardner, Julia Steier, Alice Tangerini, Marcos Caraballo Ortiz, Aleksander Radosavljevic, Nicole Webster, Heather Richardson, Juan Pablo Hurtado Padilla, and Lee Coykendall in the Q?rius Science Education Center at the National Museum of Natural History. This class was an introduction to botany for local teenagers across the greater Washington, DC metro area. The overarching theme of the class was 'orphaned' crops and floristic changes incurred by global climate change. The workshop was focused around Araceae because it contains a number of understudied crop plants that are grown in areas threatened by sea level rise.
On the first evening, students learned about collections-based botanical research, the value of voucher specimens, and the importance of herbaria around the world. Students received a tour of the herbarium led by Canty and Dube. During the tour, Caraballo showed his collections of parasitic plants and explained how some specimens are bottled in alcohol. Radosavljevic showed several new legume species that he described from collections housed at the US National Herbarium. Tangerini explained the process of botanical illustration using the drawings she made of Radosavljevic's new species as an example. In the Q?rius lab, students placed slices of pineapple and malanga coco (Xanthosoma sagittifolium), cooked and uncooked, onto Petri plates of gelatin to observe protease activity in the pineapple fruit and determine if such protein digesting enzymes are also present in the corm tissue of malanga coco. With a basket of local grocery store produce, the students learned the difference between a tuber, a bulb, and a corm; each student received a taro (Colocasia esculenta) or malanga coco corm to plant in a cup and watch sprout in the Q?rius growth chambers during the course of the 4-week workshop.
The following week the students received an introduction to the scientific process from a wider perspective. It was emphasized that scientific investigations are rarely a linear progression from problem and hypothesis through results and discussion; rather, science is a multifaceted approach where ideas are tested in response to discoveries made through exploration and feedback from peers in the community to address issues ranging from everyday curiosities to global social dilemmas. Examples of this holistic view of the scientific process were given by Hodel, a postdoctoral researcher who just arrived at the Smithsonian one week prior. Hodel explained the various challenges he encountered and the discoveries he made researching mangrove reproductive biology around the Florida peninsula. Returning to Araceae, the students were given a simple, six couplet dichotomous key to identify some common aroid houseplants. After doing so, the students were given two additional plants, Epipremnum aureum and Philodendron hederaceum, and were asked to rewrite the key to include these taxa. After discussing their creative solutions to this problem, each group of students was assigned a different aroid species from which to collect tissue and press a voucher specimen.
The third class opened with an introduction by Carlsen-Krause, a world expert of Araceae, research associate in the Botany Department, and currently Assistant Scientist and Education Coordinator at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Carlsen-Krause inspired students as she recounted how she chose to become a botanist and the importance of botanical research in the 21st century. She taught the class the elements of a herbarium label and had them write labels for the houseplants they pressed the previous week. After mounting their specimens on herbarium sheets, the students observed the morphology of their assigned aroid species under the stereoscope. Each group also prepared a wet mount of macerated petiole tissue from their plants to observe the raphide phytoliths under polarized light microscopy. The students met with teenagers taking the Microscopy After School Workshop and used SEM to observe the subtle geometric differences in raphides of different aroid species. At the end of the class, they observed their proteinase assay plates and observed the buds sprouting from their potted taro and malanga coco plants.
The workshop concluded the last week with a visit to the U.S. Botanic Garden. Student groups were paired with a botanist mentor and given a dichotomous key (developed by Carlsen-Krause, Dube, and Johnson) to the aroids of the Garden's Tropical House. The name signs for the various aroids in the garden were covered with neon pink number signs, one through forty-five, and the students were asked to correctly identify as many as possible. This activity gave students a real opportunity to wrestle with the morphological concepts and characters used to identify aroids in the field. Afterwards, over a snack of taro chips and poi, the students discussed their identifications and discoveries. USBG education specialist Coykendall explained the garden's history and mission as well as the biology of one of its most charismatic, yet noisome, aroids, Amorphophallus titanium. The students were invited to smell a jar containing its saprocantharophilic scent.
The students left this workshop with a deeper appreciation for plant diversity and the methods scientists use to understand them. Many who take these after school workshops in Q?rius go on to become teen ambassadors in the Q?rius space during weekends and over the summer months. Here, they interact with their peers and orient visitors to the many wondrous collections in its cabinets and display cases. The fluency and accuracy with which these teen docents discuss botanical collections with Q?rius visitors is in part thanks to the selfless dedication of staff members in the Botany Department who volunteered to make this After School Workshop happen.
Comments