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.
Students from a winter botany after school workshop visit the U.S. Botanic Garden to identify a number of aroids using a dichotomous key. (photo by Lee Coykendall, USBG).
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.