Amy Mei Fun CHOONG
Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, NUS
Choong, A. M. F. (2024). Poster design and presentation assignment can engage the students and community to help overcome plant blindness [Poster presentation]. In Higher Education Conference in Singapore (HECS) 2024, 3 December, National University of Singapore. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/hecs/hecs2024-amfchoong/
SUB-THEME
Opportunities from Engaging Communities
KEYWORDS
Poster design, presentation, plant blindness
CATEGORY
Poster Presentation
EXTENDED ABSTRACT
Plant blindness (Wandersee & Shussler, 1999) refers to the common inability among students and non-botanists to recognise or appreciate plants. This happens because people take plants for granted, assuming that the life-giving oxygen produced from photosynthesis will always take place, and plants will always be around to provide what we need or don’t even realise that we need plants to survive and thrive. This problem is exacerbated by the shrinking number of universities that train students to identify plants (Stroud et al., 2022) and this has led to a shortage of educators and skilled workers in plant-related industries (Choong, 2022). To stem the further decline in botanical expertise, a Minor in Botany has been launched in 2023 to provide structured botanical education. This is a collaboration between the Department of Biological Sciences and the Singapore Botanic Gardens. One of the compulsory courses, LSM3258 “Comparative Botany” offered in Semester One, covers plant form and function. To reverse plant blindness, a class assignment required students to study campus plants and to design posters to showcase them to classmates and to a general audience to engage the community. The assignment required students to pick a plant from a given list, to research their uses and to study their internal structures through freehand sectioning. These activities reinforced lecture topics on different plant organs such as leaves, roots, stems and flowers. Students initially struggled to recognise the plants and their internal structures. I helped them to find their plants, taught and corrected their techniques on free-hand sectioning. By the end of the semester, they knew their individual species intimately and had developed a new-found appreciation for plants. Most students were also enthusiastic in presenting their posters to the public to help them reverse plant blindness. This poster design and presentation is a flipped classroom pedagogy (Square & Van De Hyde, 2020). On the day of the presentation, an invitation was disseminated campus-wide, colleagues and members of the public turned up to listen to the presentation and to interact with them. With support from NUS Libraries, the posters were displayed again from January to late February 2024, and I was given an opportunity to deliver a talk based on the students’ posters to colleagues and to an online audience. The talk was entitled “Are Plants Our Saviour?” Post-talk Mentimeter surveys revealed that people understood better the importance of plants, and realised that there were many plants on campus and they have medicinal values and other valuable traits. Six months later, the students were polled to see how much knowledge they manage to retain about their plants. All said they can remember and even list some of the plants’ characteristics. In conclusion, these community engagement activities helped reverse plant blindness.
REFERENCES
Choong, M. F. A. (2022). Education on plants and fungi: an urgent call. Nature in Singapore, Supplement No. 1: e2022128. Retrieved from https://lkcnhm.nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/11/NIS_S1_279-286.pdf
Square, L., & Van De Heyde, V. (2020). Poster presentations as an approach to implementing a ‘flipped learning’ pedagogy in introductory physics. Journal of Physics, 1512, 012005. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1512/1/012005
Stroud, S., Fennell, M., Mitchley, J., Lydon, S., Peacock, J., & Bacon, K. L. (2022). The botanical education extinction and the fall of plant awareness. Ecology and Evolution, 12, e9019. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.9019
Wandersee, J.H. & E.E. Schussler (1999). Preventing plant blindness. The American Biology Teacher 61 (2), 82–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/4450624