EDUCATION FORUM

2009 Grant Awards Program (GAP) Winners
Plant Science Education: Artistic Views, News You Can Use, and State-of-the-Art Overviews

The ASPB Grant Awards Program (GAP), was created and sponsored by ASPB’s Education Foundation in 2004. Since that inaugural year, GAP has afforded the Foundation many interesting opportunities to promote an understanding of plant biology concepts to educators, students, and the general public in a wide variety of settings.

GAP awards are granted to ASPB members who have developed effective teaching ideas and widely appealing outreach activities that explain or highlight interesting discoveries in plant science. Of the 13 applicants who submitted for GAP 2009, five were awarded funds. This translates to a 39% funding rate.

This year’s winning projects will excite interest through state-of-the-art technology, inquiry-based teaching, and multimedia professional development presentations. The Foundation Board appreciates the impressive level of individual expertise and creativity each project adds to the Society’s outreach efforts.

Dan Cosgrove

ChloroFilms: A Competition for New Plant Biology Videos on YouTube
Daniel Cosgrove
Department of Biology, Penn State University

GAP support was granted for Year 2 of this novel project that engages plant biologists and artists in producing plant biology videos with universal access on YouTube. The project extends ChloroFilms’ resources for where to find and how to make plant biology videos.

The 2008 contest featured three categories: General, Technical, and Series. This worked quite well and will serve as the basis for the new contest. Feedback from 2008 confirmed that standard lecture-style videos fall flat with the judges (even professional plant biologists), so the 2009 call for videos will emphasize that the judges are looking for creativity, spark, and humor in the videos, as well as interesting science content. Filmmakers will be encouraged to be imaginative and pay attention to the production qualities of the video.

The 2009 competition also will ask applicants and allow interested parties to:

• Apply to one of two contests, with deadlines of December 1 and April 15—Most applicants come from universities and these dates work well with the academic calendars.
• Promote more international involvement—In 2008, entries came from Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Germany, as well as the United States. Outreach for 2009 will include the title “international video contest” on the website, and Karl Niklas, the past president of the Botanical Society of America (BSA; another ChloroFilms supporter), will actively promote international involvement. Celia Knight (Leeds, UK) also expressed interest in getting attention in the UK for the contest.
• Involve video classes and filmmakers—Two of the top winners in the 2008 contest were artists rather than plant biologists. More of this crossing of science and art is a good thing. Randy Olson, a scientist turned filmmaker, now will work with the contest advisory board.
• Be aware of the triage system—Some 2008 submissions were too simple or unpolished. Submissions to the 2009 contest will be vetted by a hired group of students. Scores will determine which videos make it to the judges.
• Use the ChloroFilms website—Updates to the site will make it much easier to locate quality videos in plant biology (beyond the winners in this contest) and develop resources and tips for making quality videos.
• Respond to the incentive system for early entries—Last-minute video entries can complicate the judging process. Benefits for early entries will be included in 2009.
• Blog, comment, and exchange information on the ChloroFilms website—People interested in science videos will be able to use the site to create, expand, and apply the clever content of the best plant biology videos.

Steven van Nocker		Norm Lownds

Growing Public Understanding of Plant Breeding and Genetics
Steven van Nocker
Department of Horticulture, Michigan State University
Norm Lownds
Director, MSU/4H Children’s Garden

“Growing Public Understanding of Plant Breeding and Genetics” will create permanent living plant exhibits that illustrate and explain concepts of plant genetics, domestication, and breeding to both K–12 and adult audiences. The exhibits will be based in the Michigan State University (MSU) Horticulture Gardens, a major tourist attraction in Michigan that draws more than 200,000 visitors annually. Currently, there is no existing genetics-related education content in the MSU Horticulture Gardens, and this project appears to be unique among public gardens. The Gardens will support facilitated learning through science field trips and programs (10,000 students annually) and informal learning (general garden visitors). This collection of public gardens includes the 4-H Children’s Gardens. Programs at the 4-H Children’s Gardens attract an ethnically diverse audience, and admission is free. The exhibit developed by Steven and Norm will offer online components that enhance and expand the garden exhibits and allow wider dissemination.

Steve, project PI, states that “the project will connect one of the most heavily visited public gardens in the United States with a center of excellence in plant breeding and genetics. It is crucial that the public appreciate improvements made to plants through breeding and the value of this process to society. Moreover, public understanding of important issues related to plant biotechnology can be enhanced through increased knowledge of ‘classical’ genetics, appreciation of the process of domestication, and familiarity with approaches of traditional plant breeding. A better understanding of biology is especially important in Michigan as the state is undergoing change from a traditional industrial economy to one based on biomedical research and bio/renewable energy.”
The garden at MSU will feature several side-by-side plantings of domesticated crops with a related wild species. Narration will indicate geographic origin and possible route of domestication, as well as specific traits that have been altered. Through the plant displays, narration, and activities, visitors will gain new understanding and recognize the important roles plant breeding and genetics play in their everyday lives. All exhibits will provide enough background information to be viewed independently, but will be especially informative when viewed in sequence. The featured plants will be:

• Brassica plans will show the incredible variation in growth habit and inflorescence architecture among the six domesticated forms of Brassica oleracea most common to our audience (cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, and kale) and its variation from a wild accession.
• Tomato plantings will feature the wild, green-fruited species S. pennellii juxtaposed with commercial cherry, plum, and beefsteak cultivars to illustrate fruit quality characters.
• Teosinte/corn will show distinct tillering, flowering habit, and cob and kernel traits.
• Wheat will illustrate various phenotypes of the extant species that have the A, B, and D genomes and the tetraploid and modern hexaploids. This exhibit additionally will convey the concept of polyploidization.
• Other plants will convey, through secondary exhibits dispersed throughout the Horticulture Gardens, the concept of domestication. These will take advantage of existing plantings of ornamentals and will involve installation of a wild relative at a proximal location. These include the existing apple/crab apple collection (with a new planting of the Kazakh wild apple, Malus sieversii) and the existing Rose Garden (with a new planting of a wild rose, Rosa rugosa).

This project will offer web resources on plant genetics, domestication, and breeding including interactive photo and video sharing, a Wonder Wall, age-appropriate games and puzzles, educational activities, and a discussion board (eg.: Michigan 4-H Children's Garden Tour and Michigan 4-H Children's Garden list of games). The Wonder Wall is a unique online communication tool that is a digital cross between a bulletin board and text messaging with a bit of creative graphics added. Project organizers, including Dr. Lownds, will moderate each Wonder Wall.

The garden and web page development will be carefully documented so that other developers can adopt and apply the model. This information will be distributed statewide and nationally to ASPB members as well as museum, science center, and garden educators and managers. This project will be discussed at conferences, such as ASPB, American Public Gardens Association, Museums and the Web, American Association of Museum’s Marketplace of Ideas, and the National Children and Youth Gardening Symposium. To link with formal education, curricula based on state and national science standards will be written and made available on our websites as well as the ASPB Education web pages. The project will be promoted through the Michigan Science Teachers Association, the 4-H Children’s Garden, participating schools, and the National Children, Youth & Gardens Network of the American Horticultural Society.

The impact of the project will be assessed through visitor surveys and interviews, both on-site and following up after six months. The assessment goal is to show how this project effectively connects the general public to plant genetics in new and exciting ways both when they visit the gardens and when they return home.

Kent Bradford		Jamie Miller

Biotechnology for Sustainability: Building Resources for Public Education
Kent J. Bradford
Academic Director, Seed Biotechnology Center; Professor, Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis
Jamie Miller
Assistant Director, Seed Biotechnology Center; Discovery Fellow, University of California, Davis

Upon learning of their GAP award, PI Kent Bradford stated, “We are delighted that the ASPB Education Foundation has funded our GAP proposal. In order to sustain food, fiber, and fuel production from plants indefinitely into the future while providing for the anticipated 9 billion people on the earth, we must apply the best science and use all the tools available.”

This project is intended to be used as one of these tools. From a scientific perspective, transgenic modification of crops is an extension of thousands of years of crop modification by farmers. Yet, transgenic technology is currently limited commercially to only a few major agronomic crops (corn, cotton, soybean, and canola), while regulatory and marketing issues prevent the commercialization of a large pipeline of beneficial traits and crops. The public controversy over “genetic modification” has made some consumers resistant to eating genetically modified foods. This, in turn, has resulted in relatively limited commercialization of crops developed using biotechnology compared to its demonstrated potential.

Kent elaborates, “Experience to date with biotech crops has clearly demonstrated their beneficial contributions to reducing pesticide use, promoting conservation tillage, reducing farm fuel use, and increasing yields. Despite this mounting evidence, some groups continue to argue that biotechnology is incompatible with sustainability.”

Therefore, with GAP funding Kent’s team will augment current resources of the Seed Biotechnology Center (SBC) at UC Davis by developing informational materials that promote the concept of “Biotechnology for Sustainability.”

Kent and co-PI Jamie Miller have chosen the following five traits to focus on in their initial campaign: decreasing soil erosion through herbicide tolerance; reducing pesticide use through insect resistance; increased crop survival/yield from stress tolerance; decreased fertilizer requirements and global warming gas emissions through nitrogen use efficiency; and health benefits through improved nutritional traits, particularly in countries with less diversity of and access to food. Jamie will generalize and condense information on these traits into specific case studies, highlighting traits’ abilities to contribute to more sustainable agricultural production systems. This will include showing how biotech crops can benefit both developed and developing countries.

Materials describing the five case studies will be widely distributed and a website will be produced to post educational information related to “Biotechnology for Sustainability.” A display will be produced and tested, allowing hands-on interaction with consumers to learn more about how biotechnology will help make our food supply more sustainable. These case studies will be used as models for development of additional ones in the future.

Kent and his colleagues are convinced that providing a positive, scientific image of plant biotechnology to students and consumers is critical to counter its portrayal by some groups as being dangerous, unneeded, and of little benefit to humanity (e.g., example). By creating well-documented, clear, and readily accessible case studies, the project will provide resources that can be used by ASPB members and staff to present the economic, health, and agricultural values of biotechnology in various venues. The project’s materials and display can be reproduced and used by other groups in their local educational efforts. Kent’s long-range goal is to broadly promote the “Biotechnology for Sustainability” concept to create public support for reducing regulatory and marketing hurdles to the utilization of recombinant DNA methods in crop improvement.

Kent explains, “Our project will document in clear terms for diverse audiences the science-based data demonstrating that biotechnology contributes positively to agricultural sustainability. Furthermore, the project will describe projects in the development pipeline that promise even more significant impacts in the future.”

Steven Strauss

Informing the Public About the Science of Agricultural Biotechnology and Environment
Steven H. Strauss
Professor, Department of Forest Ecosystems & Society
Director of Outreach in Biotechnology , Oregon State University

GAP funds will be used to continue the Food for Thought (FFT) lecture series at Oregon State University (OSU). The goal of this well-supported lecture series is to bring leading scholars to present biotechnology and related issues to the public. The GAP funds granted from ASPB to support the public lectures will be supplemented by Oregon State University College of Agricultural Sciences, including videotaping, editing, marketing, and web-hosting services, as well as administrative support and indirect costs underwriting.

FTT’s focus for 2009–2011 will be on biotechnology in relation to the environment and sustainability. This focus is motivated by (1) the growing environmental concerns of the public; (2) growing scientific evidence for serious concerns about the long-term sustainability of the global agriculture and food system; (3) increasing power of plant genomics and biotechnology to provide solutions by improved breeding and genetic engineering; (4) abundant misinformation, or highly biased or sensationalized information, that is aggressively marketed to the public from a variety of sources; and (5) public apprehension as reflected in large regulatory and marketplace obstacles throughout the world, both to translational research and application of transgenic biotechnology innovations. Strauss believes there is a pressing need for high-quality plant and biotechnology science to inform this ongoing debate, which ASPB and its members can best provide.

The FTT series has run for four years, hosted 23 speakers, and been very well attended. View graphs that demonstrate FTT’s outreach and lecture-related web hits. The large majority of the lecture presentation slides and the videotaped lectures themselves have been edited and put on our Biotechnology Outreach website. View a complete list of the impressive speakers and links to their engaging presentations. Speakers under consideration for 2009–2011 are being vetted and scheduled.

In addition to hosting the lectures, FTT developers have produced study guides for each presentation. These guides are intended to help undergraduate and high school teachers use the lectures in teaching, and they will continue to be developed.
Dissemination of FTT starts right on the OSU campus. With intentional support from the lecture series organizers, OSU’s introductory biology class teachers have sent many dozens of students to the FTT lectures. The broader public is also an important audience to FTT organizers, and FTT project leaders provide an annual press release, notices on speakers of special interest, and various program advertisements.

It is intended for the FTT series to combat the reality that high-quality plant science often is a minor player and even a pawn in the major public information networks. Large-scale environmental issues, due to their enormous complexity, have been particularly vexing and subject to misrepresentation (1). Strauss and his colleagues have created FTT as one avenue that can help scientists and scientific organizations such as ASPB enhance their public roles. The FTT lecture series, including its broadcast to the country and world via the web, offers a strong voice for scholars whose work deserves regard as scientifically and contextually responsible.

Ken Korth

Plant Clippings: Production and Distribution of Web-Based Videos Covering Principles of Plant Biology
Ken Korth, PhD
Department of Plant Pathology, University of Arkansas

Ken responded to winning GAP funds by saying, “I think one of the most important things we can do as scientists is to communicate our enthusiasm for the complex biology at the base of all the important things that plants do on earth. I’m excited about the opportunity to do that, given to us by the ASPB Education Foundation GAP. Developing “Plant Clippings” is a great opportunity for me to work with some really talented teachers and young people, and we look forward to building a quality product.”

This “quality product” of web-based videos will support plant biologists who sometimes struggle to communicate the importance of the discipline to the general population. The average person has firsthand experience with needs in medical science, or has observed advances in the exciting world of space exploration. However, many people often take for granted access that they have to cheap and plentiful food, and most rarely give thought to the importance of plant biology or agriculture in their daily lives. This project makes clever use of technology and art to addresses this gap in awareness and information.

“Plant Clippings” is a series of videos with science at the forefront, produced in a way that students will want to watch and, more important, want to learn more about the topic. Each video will be two to five minutes of entertaining plant biology content targeted primarily to an audience of students in grades 7–12, but that will hopefully have an appeal to all ages. The video production team will work with a select group of high school students to write and produce a series of web-based videos communicating the principles and excitement of plant biology.

Videos will be designed to feature at least one of the 12 Principles of Plant Biology developed by ASPB. One preliminary production idea is “Mutants Surround Us!!” With a healthy dose of 50s-era special effects and haunting music, presented initially in black-and-white to complete the effect, a horror-show–style introduction of plant mutants appears. Of course, the audience would quickly learn exactly what a mutant is, and that mutants can often be good things. An in-hand dwarf variety of rice, deficient in gibberellic acid (GA) production, will be used to demonstrate that plants use hormones. The genetic basis of the mutation will be discussed, as the dwarf phenotype will be rescued via application of GA. This episode directly addresses principle #11, “Plant growth and development are under the control of hormones.”

Dissemination of the final productions will be via the web on both general and educational sites, and via DVDs distributed to teachers for use in their classrooms. Additionally, the ASPB Education Foundation has allocated resources to distribute the DVDs at major teaching events such as the National Association of Biology Teachers and the National Science Teachers Association annual meetings.

Further information about the ASPB Education Foundation, established GAP projects, and GAP funding is available on the ASPB Education Foundation page.

Reference
Lemaux, P.G., (2009). Genetically Engineered Plants and Foods: A Scientist’s Analysis of the Issues (Part II). Annual Review of Plant Biology 60: 511–559.