The great scientific program of the XX International Botanical Congress (IBC2024) also included a couple of Symposia dedicated to the relationship between Plants & Society.
In the first session of “LET PEOPLE COME TO BOTANY”, Glaucia Silva – a young botanist from Brazil – made the auditorium tremble with her formidable talk “The Taylor Swift’s Method: music videos as advance organizers for meaningful learning in Botany”.
We met Glaucia at The Annals of Botany booth to know more about her enthusiasm for plants and to talk about her innovative strategy to raise interest in Botany. She confessed that she has always been passionate about plants, but she soon realised that she was the only undergraduate student in her biology course being super motivated in plant science … most of her classmates seemed to dislike Botany! But what’s behind this “hate”?
Glaucia thinks that it’s not really hate … science students usually complain about difficulties in learning plant taxonomy and understanding plant systematics: indeed, it’s quite hard to remember complex nomenclature of the plant world (and recall the names of almost half a million species living on planet Earth,) and untangle the intricated relationships among hundreds of plant families.
It’s also a matter of “Plant awareness disparity”: despite plants play a fundamental role for our lives, the society fails to notice them around us and to recognize their relevance for the biosphere. This plant blindness could also be related to a general lack of connection between humans and plants as well as little availability of attractive teaching resources at all educational stages – from primary school to academia.
Why do people do not see plants?
“For example, kids usually want a pet, not a plant, to take care of. Society likes animals as they are more charismatic than plants, they interact with us and the distance is shorter. At school, we receive teaching in zoology and human physiology but far less in botany. Those teachers that are not interested in plants would spread the lack of enthusiasm to those students who will become science professionals not motivated about botany”.
Glaucia added that tackling plant awareness is a complex mission that involves the school, the society and the academy in a circle. She believes that we should all rethink education to break this vicious circle.
Tell us more about your experience as Botany teacher
“During my internship, I had the task to think about new methods to teach plant biology to 2nd year high school students (14-16th year-old) in a more engaging way”.
Hard times: during the COVID-19 pandemic, students were tired and felt overwhelmed by the situation. The challenge was to create a strategy to make online classes more entertaining. By that time, Taylor Swift released her new album “Folklore” and Glaucia realised that her songs had a lot of references to the plant world in both lyrics and videos. She had the brilliant idea: use Taylor Swift’s music to introduce the Botany course.
Out of more than 50 videos, she chose one for each of the 4 topics of the syllabus. One week before each lesson, she sent the YouTube links to students: homework consisted in watching a 5’ music video, observing natural elements and taking notes about botanical references – to be discussed in the first part of the remote lesson.
TAYLOR SWIFT METHOD APPLIED TO PLANT SCIENCE
VIDEO 1: Blank Space (Album: 1989)
