| Abstract Detail
Education and Outreach Krosnick, Shawn [1], Moore, Kelly [2]. Rooting students in their botanical history: a collaborative curriculum for herbarium curators and high school students and educators. It has been well documented that students often overlook plants when they consider the natural world. Early interventions in elementary education have shown that students not only enjoy botanical learning experiences but may also gain long-term benefits. However, botanical curricula are rare in K-12 education and especially so at the high school level. This can result in university students who fail to appreciate the critical role plants play in understanding topics such as ecology, conservation, and climate change. Equally important is the need for student exposure to natural history collections given the wealth of information they provide about both the past and future of life on earth. To address the deficit of botanical preparation in K-12, we have created a collaborative educational program for use in high school curricula. The program brings together herbarium curators and high school educators for learning experiences that take place in the classroom, the field, the herbarium, and online. The core concept underlying the project is that everyone has a connection to plants – their own botanical history – and this is fundamentally connected to their family history. Students connect to their botanical history, where they identify specific plants that are significant to them or their family. They work with these plants in the field and in the herbarium, learning how to collect plants, prepare archival specimens, and digitize them. Moving through 10 educational modules, students will work with many types of digitized specimen data and explore career options in natural history collections. Each module is critically reviewed, tested, and improved through direct collaboration with high school biology teachers and students. Instructional videos, teacher guides, student worksheets, and supplemental activities are being made available via QUBES and Google Sites for use across the country, with final release of the entire project estimated in January 2024.
1 - Tennessee Technological University, Department of Biology, Department of Biology, Tennessee Technological University, 1100 N Dixie Ave, Cookeville, TN, 38505, USA
2 - Tennessee Tech University, Curriculum and Instruction, Cookeville, TN, 38505, USA
Keywords:
Herbarium
high school
Curriculum.
Presentation Type: Oral Paper
Number: EO1009
Abstract ID:921
Candidate for Awards:None |
