Human Flower Project

HFP Guide for Science Teachers

Have at Johnny Depp and recipes for hibiscus tea, meanwhile learn about science on Human Flower Project, too. Two LSU scholars uncover the teaching potential of HFP and we post their discovery for teachers to use.

Introducing HFP’s Guide for Teachers, inspiration for
your science class
Image: Human Flower Project

Does it make money? No. Is it finding a cure for shingles ? Doubtful. Then why bother with the Human Flower Project, now in its fifth year?

Actually, we’ve never cooked up much of a raison d’etre, so how delightful to have one supplied! Kate March and Jim Wandersee, a biologist and a botanist at Louisiana State University, inform us that the Human Flower Project is a teaching tool.

Kate, a Ph.D. candidate in biology education at LSU, is part of the 15 Degree Laboratory, Dr. Wandersee’s research hub for life science literacy and plant science education.
This past spring, Jim asked Kate to explore the archives of the Human Flower Project, from our inception in September 2004 through April 2008. She pulled out roughly 200 posts that can be used to teach science. (And you thought this was just a Johnny Depp fanzine!)

You may be surprised to find the Johnny Depp entry among Kate’s science-learning assignments; it’s our article about bilateral symmetry, a beauty-making feature of most flowers and some people, and a concept that belongs to botany, biology, and geometry (art and aesthetics, too, for that matter).

Kate March, Ph.D. student in Biology Education at LSU, created the HFP Guide for Science Teachers with Professor Jim Wandersee

After discussions with Jim, Kate gathered our most “classroom-appropriate” science-minded posts into a handy Excel file, each one summarized and hot-linked. The HFP_Guide_for_Science_Teachers.xls “runs as a spreadsheet under both Excel 2003 and Excel 2007,” Jim writes. “We guarantee it is safe. We have also built-in macro commands which allow the user to re-sort the table by her/his chosen column category, for convenience when searching.”

Kate has tagged the posts with general topic areas: biology, food, medicine, classification, conservation, ecology, endangered, genetics, invasives, about children, and more. For botanists, the file is also tagged by plant part (leaves, flowers, stems, etc.), and did we say it’s searchable?

The 15 Degree Laboratory, researching new visual approaches to science teaching, is re-envisioning biology studies; it has also stoked our imagination. The science concepts March and Wandersee find here make us itch to add more tags, especially geographic ones. “Here’s to Salep,” categorized as a “food” post on the Guide for Science Teachers, could also be used in a class about Turkish culture. “Pom-Pom of the Monsoon” is a mini-course on Bangladesh, its climate and its society. Jim Wandersee and his long-time research partner Dr. Renee Clary at Mississippi State University have written many posts for HFP, including one on New Orleans’ chicory-flavored coffee. Jim, doesn’t this, as well as our post on collard greens, belong on an American Studies syllabus?

All you graduate students in the humanities, we welcome you to take up Kate March’s gauntlet and fill out these Excel columns with prompts for teachers of art, psychology, history, and literature.  (Really, and if you need help adding to the spreadsheet, contact us.)

We asked Jim to tell us something about HFP’s generous grad-student archivist. Kate March, whom Jim recruited to LSU from Boston, began her career in the Northeast’s biotech industry, then taught high school biology and oceanography in Westborough, MA. She’s now a Ph. D. student in Biology Education at LSU and also works as an informal science educator at the Bluebonnet Swamp Nature Center in Baton Rouge.

Professors Wandersee and Clary continue to write articles for HFP, one effort of their EarthScholars Research Group. They’re working to integrate botanical and geological knowledge and so improve the study of science through scholarly writings and consultation with botanical gardens and fossil parks. Their “dance card” on the lecture circuit stays full, taking them to U.S. cities and across the world (Beijing, Florence, London, Oslo, Oxford, Vienna, all in recent months).

Logo for the 15 Degree Laboratory at LSU, optimizing science learning with visuals that teach
Image: 15 Degree Laboratory

Their substantive posts here on the Human Flower Project have been among our most popular—on topics as diverse as plant blindness, men’s taste in flowers, plant nomenclature and athletic turf.  Jim manages to teach science concepts without the squeak of chalk or the smell of formaldehyde. His work is especially strong on detail, humor, and visuals. “15 degrees is a research-based angle,” he tells us. “It represents the ‘sweet spot’ of human vision” and demonstrates that the conditions for learning are as important as content. (Check it out!).

Nothing could have prepared us for these developments on Human Flower Project. Kate, Renee and Jim, we can’t thank you enough. The HFP Guide for Science Teachers is now a fixture on this website; it’ll remain on the home page, at left (in the margin, between “Categories” and “Most Recent Entries”) for handy downloading.  Please spread the word! If you have questions or any problems using the Guide, write to us. We dearly hope that teachers will find this resource, use it, and tell us what students make of it.

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