A Floral Guide For Science Teachers

Teacher Judy Baxter of Hahira, Georgia, uses her laptop for a class on Leucojum (snowflakes). Photo: Judy Baxter/Old Shoe Woman.

Lesson plans are now in the works. And just in time, thanks to a student at Mississippi State, we offer an updated guide for using this website in the classroom.

School hasn’t even begun but we already feel that Human Flower Project has gone to the head of the class!

Thanks to Mauriesa Johnson of Mississippi State University and the Earth*Scholars, we can gratefully offer a Science Teacher’s Guide to all seven years of this website.  This means that teachers have easy access to 269 illustrated essays on a wild (and domesticated) array of topics, all succinctly categorized and summarized.

Geography teachers, are you planning to study Iceland or Hungary? Just search for these nation’s names (or others that interest you) in the file and discover our stories about invasive species and an ongoing controversy over genetically modified plants.

Preparing a unit on conservation? The HFP archive includes nine stories that should be on target, with examples from Idaho to India. Other topics we’ve covered pretty extensively include flowers in medicine, food, ethics, and ecology. But see for yourself:

Kate March and James Wandersee compiled the first Science Teachers Guide and created a straightforward way to scan all scientifically inclined articles. “Mauriesa and I attempted to follow Kate March’s and Jim Wandersee’s coding scheme,” writes Earth*Scholar and geologist Renee Clary, who has been Mauriesa’s mentor in this effort.

Mauriesa Johnson of Belmont, Mississippi, a double major in Biology and Biology Education at Mississippi State University, has updated the Science Teachers Guide to the Human Flower Project. Photo: Jennifer Weir.

Mauriesa carried out this work with a grant from Mississippi State’s Teachers for a Competitive Tomorrow-Baccalaureate (TCT-B) program, funded through the U.S. Department of Education. “The goal of the project is to produce high quality science teachers for Mississippi schools,” Clary writes. “One aspect of the grant is training future science teachers to have not only a strong background in education, but also a strong knowledge of research.”

Mauriesa Johnson with Dr. Renee Clary of Mississippi State and a poster of the Teachers for a Competitive Tomorrow program, training science educators for Mississippi schools. Photo: Jennifer Weir.

A double major in Biology and Biology Science Education, now also working with Clary at the Dunn-Seiler Museum of Geosciences at MSU, Mauriesa was the ideal person to undertake this project. With a solid science background and understanding of teachers’ practical needs, she and Kate March have made a resource that we hope is optimally teacher-utilitarian and student friendly.

We are enormously grateful to the Earth*Scholars and to Kate and Mauriesa for this contribution to Human Flower Project and very much hope it can carry the pollen of HFP into classrooms everywhere. We’d be eager to post any questions or comments you may have about the guide and would be thrilled learn what happens if these posts make it to real live classrooms, home schools, and other ethno-gardens of education.