Plant Biology Teaching Resources (Higher Education)

Free full access: Very nice set of undergraduate-level essays on topics including climate change, synthetic biology and plankton.

Fascinating study - who do you think carries the most plant seeds on their clothing and luggage? Which parts of the continent are most vulnerable? How will future warming temperatures affect the risks?

Giving over even a small amount of classroom time to Student Talk has big payouts - increased attention and retention. Here are some very straightforward suggestions for how to get started. Two thumbs up!

"A series designed to provide education professionals with accessible and authoritative writing centred on current issues in UK science education."

The most recent one, "Inquiry Based Learning", includes four thoughtful essays on how and why inquiry-based learning can be implemented into science education. "What is the role of inquiry based learning in inspiring education, and what are its boundaries and limitations?".

"Relations between science and policy are sometimes troubled....Prominent examples include the acrimonious debate over scientific understandings of climate change ....disputes over the use of genetically modified crops and foods in Europe, the failure to acknowledge the risk of possible BSE transmission to humans. and conflict over stem cell research....".

The interface between science and society is not simple, but sometimes it's good to stretch our minds in a different direction.

Think globally! Green economies and environmental priorities, all wrapped in up a colorful magazine format. If your students like policy, send them here.

We're updating our "Careers in Plant Biology" flyer and just remembered this set of articles from Plant Physiology (2001 - 2002). Plant biologists from diverse career tracks reflect on the choices they made along the way. Maybe these stories will help your students to see the possibilities open to them. 

iBioSeminars: Free biology videos online
The world's leaders in biology present lectures that start with broad introductions and then progress to research questions and experiments. From cell biology and biochemistry to health and behavior. And a tiny bit of plant biology, but you have to hunt for it. Several have resources for teaching.

Why are plant biologists concerned with type 2 diabetes?

A) It's the fastest growing disease in the world, and our students are at risk,

B) The ways that popular media report on food and health risks are generally quite poor,

and

C) Plant scientists understand the relationships between "plants" and "food" better than anyone.

We're working on a Teaching Tool called "Plants, Food and Human Health" that connects these dots, and links to evidence-based research to support the connections. In the meantime, this program of four short videos from Discovery CME is a good introduction to the global type 2 diabetes epidemic.

This is very clear and well-presented video describing how and why to build and analyze a model of leaf development, from the Coen lab at the John Innes Centre. Highly accessible to students. What else can be modeled? How can models lead to experimentally testable hypotheses?

Here is a very nice, open access, recollection of Norman Borlaug, written by Sanjaya Rajaram. Good article for students to learn a bit of plant science history, and also includes some "Future Issues". Inspiring!

The USA Science and Engineering Festival is a huge free public event to showcase and celebrate science (in Washington DC in April). This month it is highlighting PLANT BIOLOGY as a great career choice. Pass it along!

Outstanding lecture given 28 February 2011 by Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel Laureate, President of the UK Royal Society, one of the greatest champions of science, and all-round good guy. The lecture is called "The New Enlightment", and in it he talks about how science works, and how it has and continues to improve our lives, and why we need to promote it and defend it.

Here he quotes Norman Borlaug:

“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Bravo Sir Paul!

(PS - downl0ad transcript if you can't access the iPlayer - we''ll add a link to youtube if it turns up there).

After receiving recognition for her work in bringing science to a wider audience, Anne Osterrieder discusses how researchers and academics can make their work more accessible...

We're grateful for the kind words of the ASPB president about Teaching Tools in Plant biology!

Here is a youtube playlist suitable for a public outreach event. The first seven videos (about 30 minutes) are scientists talking about plants and plant science. Videos 8 - 12 (about 6 minutes) are just time lapse videos set to music. Videos 13 - 17 are clips from David Attenborough, and number 18 is "La Bloomba", dancing flowers. Enjoy!

Write clever ideas simply, not simple ideas "cleverly". If your sentence includes more than eight commas and two parenthetical asides, start over. We don't know what this lovely calligraphy says, but we imagine it says "Simple declarative sentence = clear communication"