Poster: Education & outreach

Abs # 929: Doing plant physiology at a liberal arts college: lectures begone!

Presenter:	Firooznia, Fardad , firooznia@denison.edu
Authors	Firooznia, Fardad  (A)
Affiliations:	(A): Denison University

Teaching at a liberal arts college provides one with the perfect opportunity to provide not only knowledge of a subject but, more importantly, modes of thought and approaches to learning, skills that allow the students to continue learning past formal education. The experimental nature of plant physiology as a discipline makes it well suited for such an approach to teaching. My course is not a survey of plant physiology; only a few topics are chosen in a given semester for in-depth study. The components of the course emphasize experimental design, data analysis, and written and oral presentation of scientific information. The bulk of each unit (samples provided) is spent on the laboratory: introduction before and analysis and discussion after each experiment. The lab is the main venue of learning in the class. “Lectures” are recitation sections: the students are provided with the outline of the topics for a given unit, and are expected to be more independent in their reading and learning the material in the textbook, and I focus only on questions and problems and difficult topics. This allows for more flexibility and more independent learning on the part of the students. The course incorporates readings from the primary literature to show the current state of research in the hot topics in plant physiology as related to the experiment for each unit. This is done in a journal club format with student-led discussions of the articles. After the first or second articles, the discussions become very lively. The open-book exams in this class focus on further analysis and deduction, rather than rote knowledge. The students appreciated such an approach as "in the work place a problem may come up and you will be able to use your resources to come up with the best solution."