Greening the classroom

“How often do you eat DNA?”

Martha Kirouac, PhD ’03, asks a group of high-school biology teachers during a summer course at the Huntington Library. “Do you know you’re eating it right now, in that banana?” The group then grinds up a banana, mixes it with a little dish soap, salt, and water, and pours in some ice-cold ethanol. “Out comes this big wad of DNA and associated proteins,” Martha says. “The teachers’ students love it when they get to try it in the classroom.” When the teachers ask their students if they eat DNA, the response frequently is “Nooooo! That’s so gross!”

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At the Huntington, it’s the teachers who are Martha’s students. The professional development course she’s teaching is called “Grounding in Botany,” and it’s meant to help biology instructors in Los Angeles–area high schools discover how they can use plant-based experiments in the classroom to open new horizons in the life sciences for their students. Initiated as a two-week class in 2004, the course has since evolved into a four-week educational program, supported by funds from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

Botanical educator Martha Kirouac looks on as teacher Michael
Milburn infects a sunflower plant with a bacterium that causes crown gall, a disfiguring but not life-threatening cancer of plants.

“The high-school teachers are desperate for ways to translate the state educational standards into meaningful activities in the classroom that catch the student’s attention,” says Kirouac, who designed the classwork and experiments and now teaches the course with fellow botanical educator Mike Kerkman. “They take a lot of courses to be certified as an educator, but very few of these courses deal with science content. We’re filling that deficit.”

The blueprint for Martha’s efforts are California’s secondary-school standards, which specify a strict and quite challenging curriculum for teaching biological sciences in the state’s public high schools. (The complete set of requirements can be found here.) Botany has been essentially overlooked in this regard—“the only state standards directly involving plants in high school are photosynthesis and respiration,” says Kirouac—but after studying the standards, she realized that the field might offer an ideal avenue for fulfilling a variety of the other requirements. “So we promote plants as a model system for teaching other material that is in the standards.”

Kirouac maintains that plants are ideal for schools, especially for inquiry-led learning, in which students learn by direct experience. Plants are well-suited for this because they’re safe to work with, quick and easy to grow, and (in the experiments she’s chosen) inexpensive. “And kids really like to get their hands dirty.” This summer’s four-week course brought together 13 teachers from public schools throughout the Los Angeles area, although teachers from as far away as Bakersfield and even out of state have attended previous courses. Early July finds this year’s group in the Huntington’s state-of-the-art Brody Teaching Laboratory, located alongside the Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory for Botanical Science. Martha and Mike open the four-week class by having the entire group sow the plants they’ll be using in their lessons. “It’s so rewarding,” she says, “for them to see something that they’ve planted grow and to use those same plants throughout a four-week course to study a variety of scientific topics.”

The seeds for “Grounding in Botany” were actually planted by Elliot Meyerowitz, Caltech’s Beadle Professor of Biology and the current chair of the Institute’s biology division. “Jim Folsom [the director of the Botanical Gardens] and I have known each other for a long time, and had discussed the potential use of the Huntington’s brand-new educational facility for some sort of joint venture,” Meyerowitz says, “and when a funding opportunity came up, we went for it.”

Teachers Cynthia Kholos, KhinNu Thein, and Anna Villalobos help botanical educator Mike Kerkman search for mutant plant specimens in the left-hand trays, while teacher Mark Ewoldsen, Martha Kirouac, and Caltech professor Elliot Meyerowitz screen the plants on the right.

That opportunity came when Meyerowitz, who studies the developmental genetics of plants, and a team of researchers that includes Folsom and Eric Mjolsness, PhD ’86, of UC Irvine, submitted a grant proposal to the NSF for a project to integrate all the available data on plant development into an interactive computer model. Because the NSF mandated that a percentage of the grant be used on a project that integrated research and education, with a special emphasis on underrepresented groups and underserved institutions, the team proposed to provide high-school science teachers with a new set of techniques that would improve their students’ understanding of botany and developmental biology. The focus would be on the school districts surrounding Caltech, where, according to the grant proposal, “over 80 percent of the students are underrepresented in the sciences and 38 to 58 percent participate in the National School Lunch program.” Ultimately, the NSF awarded Meyerowitz and his colleagues $5 million over five years for their Computable Plant project, which included $500,000 for the teacher-education program. All they needed now was someone to set up the course.

Enter Kirouac, who had recently finished her PhD on the genetics of Caenorhabditis elegans, a roundworm, with Morgan Professor of Biology Paul Sternberg. She and her husband, Shanti Rao, PhD ’03, had decided to stay in the Pasadena area, and Martha, “contemplating what to do after graduating,” decided to look into volunteer opportunities at the Huntington. “It happened that the volunteer listings and the paid jobs were next to each other on the website, and I saw that they were looking to hire a person to do educational outreach in combination with Caltech on plant genetics and development. I contacted the Huntington Library straight away, and within a week of seeing the posting I had started the job.”

Kirouac then spent several hectic weeks developing the lesson plans from scratch. “I’d had no formal training in plants,” she says, “but I came away from Caltech knowing that if you put your mind to it. you can accomplish what you want.” Along with teaching herself some basics of botany (she received her BS in biochemistry from Union College in Schenectady, New York, in 1996), she had to figure out how to identify and recruit some 15 teachers for the first year’s program, design a syllabus that would both fulfill and build on the state standards while also meeting the NSF grant requirements, and devise some illuminating and cost-effective experiments that would work for classes of lively teenagers. “I just had to break it down. What do the teachers need? What are the key points that I want them to learn? What do we want out of it?”

“Martha’s decision to apply for this job was the best thing that happened,” says Meyerowitz. “She has organized and run it superbly from the start.”

Kirouac was also able to draw on her own personal experience as a teacher in Pasadena classrooms. “At Caltech, I worked with CAPSI [the Caltech Precollege Science Initiative] on the SEED [Science for Early Educational Development] project. I also designed a unit on microbiology and was able to help teach it with a teacher in the Pasadena Unified School District [PUSD]. It was a combined class of 6th and 7th graders, 72 children in all. It was like a warehouse, it was insane. That was a real eye-opener on the challenges teachers face.” As well as volunteering at CAPSI, Kirouac participated in Caltech’s YESS (Young Engineers and Science Scholars) program for three summers, devising and teaching biology lessons to underrepresented minority high-school students.

Above left, Los Angeles teacher Glendar Haskin dissects an Alstroemeria flower during the flower and fruit lab, while at right, dihybrid crosses of the Wisconsin Fast Plant grow in Petri dishes as part of a genetics lab.

At the Huntington, where she’s dealing with experienced educators, Martha has an opportunity to delve more deeply into the underlying science of her topic areas. For instance, during the first week of classes, as their newly planted seeds are germinating, the teachers learn how enzymes break down starch, the seed’s food supply, to provide fuel for the seedling to grow. To give a sense of the bigger picture, Martha explains that alpha-amylase, the enzyme that performs this conversion, is the same enzyme that humans have in their saliva to break down starches such as bread into sugar—which is why a piece of bread tastes sweet when chewed for a while. This then leads into a lesson on human digestive enzymes, and to a lab on testing for starches and sugars. “We try to give all our labs some kind of context, something that will excite the kids,” Martha says.

The plant Kirouac and Kerkman are using in most of their labs is the Wisconsin Fast Plant, a diminutive and fast-growing Nepalese relative of mustard bred by University of Wisconsin–Madison professor Paul Williams specifically for research and classroom use. When the plants sprout their first leaves a few days after sowing, Martha and Mike launch into a series of lessons on respiration and photosynthesis; and over the next few weeks, as the plants mature, flower, and set seed, she will cover topics such as reproduction, development, ecology, evolution, and genetics.

The teachers come into the course already knowing the basic differences between plant and animal cells, so Kirouac looks at some of the consequences of these differences, such as the fact that animal cells have mobility and plant cells don’t. This becomes the springboard for an in-depth look at cancer. The unregulated cell division that gives rise to tumors in animals also occurs in plants, where one such growth is called crown gall. To learn more about this phenomenon, and cancer in general, the class infects potted sunflowers with Agrobacterium tumefaciens—a bacterium that causes crown galls—and studies the tumors that grow from such infections by cutting through the gall to have a close look at the runaway cell growth. Meanwhile, Kirouac is busy explaining that while tumors are often lethal in animals because the cancerous cells metastasize, or migrate, around the body and grow in places they shouldn’t, they’re rarely deadly to a plant, whose cells are constrained by a rigid cell wall that doesn’t allow them to wander enough to interfere with vital cell functions.

The lesson culminates in a trek through the gardens of the Huntington to look for crown galls that have sprouted on some of the trees. Mary Snyder, a high-school science teacher at San Marino High School who attended the course in 2005, has used this lab as a way of teaching her students about cancer. “The kids liked it,” she said, “although at first some of them didn’t like the part where they had to stab the sunflower to infect it with the bacterium. I had to explain that it wouldn’t kill the plant.”

In addition to the labs, Martha has also recruited guest speakers for her program, including Meyerowitz, who talks to the teachers about his particular field of plant developmental genetics. “I have been impressed by their eagerness to learn, and by the excellent questions they ask,” he says, “and by the difficult circumstances in which they work—the shortage of textbooks, the necessity to teach the state standards and to test on them (which doesn’t leave time for any real digression on topics not in the standards) and the absence of even minimal levels of equipment for lab courses. They’re an amazing and dedicated bunch.”

Aware that the state’s public schools have to keep an eagle eye on their budgets, Kirouac has put a lot of thought into designing experiments that teachers can replicate inexpensively in the classroom. (The teachers also receive $500, funded by the NSF grant, to spend on supplies for the experiments they will later do with their students.) “We do an environmental lab on the effects of acid rain in which we use common ingredients like vinegar, lemon juice, coffee, and water that fit very specific pH profiles from 1 to 7. The teachers put radish seeds on paper towels soaked in these harmless solutions, and look at the effect of pH on germination. Then we discuss how an experiment like this can be applied to understanding the effects of acid rain. We use spinach leaves for some of our experiments, which is something they can buy fairly cheaply in a supermarket. And to study osmosis, they can peel some grapes, put them in salt or sugar, and look at the effects.”

During the four years she has taught the course, Kirouac has made it a practice to follow up with her teachers at the end of the school year to ask if they’d used any of her labs in their teaching. She’s been gratified to find that most had used a lot of them and had plans to introduce more into their classrooms the following year. “So what we’ve helped to create are teachers who’ve moved from no labs to 10 labs or more each year. That’s going to make a phenomenal difference to the experience of the students in their classrooms.”

“Martha and Mike gave us lessons we could use directly, with every detail anticipated so that everything runs smoothly,” says 2007 participant KhinNu Thein, who teaches at Temple City High School. “I’ve already used three of the labs with my students, and have lots of other new ideas that I’m going to try out.” After her 2005 course, Snyder worked five of the labs into her lessons. “We went around the gardens with Folsom, and he pointed out which leaves would be good for the kids to look at in the classroom. I use them to talk about species diversity and variation,” she said. A keen gardener herself, Snyder feels that kids like seeing things that are alive and growing in the classroom. “Why study life but never view anything living?”

Meyerowitz and Kirouac have just been awarded another grant of $26,000 from the American Society of Plant Botanists to develop a second teacher-development program in schools served by the PUSD. Their innovative plan is to bring all of the district’s high-school biology teachers to the Huntington for six all-day workshops throughout the school year. “We’ve devised labs that go with the biology textbook and assessments that all the PUSD schools have now adopted, and our plan is to train the teachers a couple of months in advance of each unit,” Martha explains. “That way, they’ll have hands-on projects and background knowledge so that their information is refreshed on a topic before they have to teach it, and perhaps they’ll have a new way to reach the students.” Again, the program provides a $500 purchasing fund for each teacher.

Future plans include going national with the summer course and introducing elements of it into educational training programs so that the newly qualified teachers can incorporate plants as model systems early on in their lesson planning.

Martha’s meticulous organizational skills are remarked on by all the teachers who have taken the course, and they should serve her well in overseeing the development of future outreach efforts. But even the most careful planning can occasionally be stymied. Each year, in preparation for a lesson on the ecology of invasive plants, Martha manages to find an unkempt patch of weeds somewhere on the Huntington’s beautifully manicured grounds, “which isn’t easy to do,” she says. But more often than not, by the time she’s ready to introduce her students to that microecosystem, it’s gone. “Right before we’re about to teach the course, the grounds staff seem to find the spot and clean it up!”