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About
History
Ideal Segue
Participants
Segues
Keystone Plants
Workshop 2007
Workshop 2008 |
The history of the Segues to Science Project is
intertwined with the history of the teaching economic and ethnobotany at the
University of Hawaii (formerly College of Hawaii). This is summarized as
follows:
- 1918 The first course is
taught (Botany 2: Economic Plants) by Joseph Rock.
- While the campus was being
developed, Joseph Rock developed the landscape as a botanical garden
featuring economically important trees. Information has been compiled
about each of the trees and has been incorporated in courses as they have
been taught.
- Over the next sixty years a
series of botanists continue to develop courses and research in the areas
of economic and ethnobotany. Chief among them is Dr. Harold St. John.
- In the 1970s Bea Krauss was
teaching ethnobotany to over 1000 students each year and because of that
ethnobotany become a household term in Hawaii. Subsequently, ethnobotany
become part of the elementary education and became incorporated to some
extent in different parts of the K-12 educational system as a whole.
- In the 1980s Isabella Abbott
began to teach ethnobotany emphasizing modern scientific research methods
and she expanded the range of ethnobotany courses being offered to include
courses for senior undergraduates and graduate students. Isabella Abbott
systematically reached out to Native Hawaiian students encouraging them to
learn to be good scientists and to be proud of the science of their
traditional cultural practices.
- In the 1990s Will McClatchey
and Kim Bridges began to expand the ethnobotany courses to include a
global perspective. This culminated in development of a Bachelor of
Science in Ethnobotany degree through the Department of Botany.
- In the 2000s the Department
of Botany organized an Ethnobotany Track including five core faculty
members (Kim Bridges, Will McClatchey, Mark Merlin, Tamara Ticktin and
David Webb) in order to teach the courses of the Ethnobotany degree and
provide research leadership in the area of Ethnobotany.
Throughout the above development
period there have been several observations that the faculty have
consistently made about the entry level students in the ethnobotany courses.
They are often:
- non-science majors (and
"turned-off" by "science")
- members of self-identifying
ethnic communities
- excited about exploring their
own "home" culture
- interested in learning from
their family and in their own (non-English) language
- interested in "alternatives"
to modern lifestyles and culture
Regular results of the
ethnobotany courses have included:
- non-science majors becoming
interested in science (or at least warming up to parts of it)
- new science undergraduate
students who changed majors based upon an ethnobotany course
- students interested in
science as part of their overall means of learning about their own family
and culture
- new undergraduate and
graduate students from ethnic communities not usually well represented in
sciences in Hawaii
The Segues to Science Project
was to developed to:
- Specifically articulate the
transitional developments that we have been observing particularly as they
relate to transitions between ethnobotany and other sciences.
- Quantify the observations so
that the project can be scientifically evaluated.
- Develop follow-up mechanisms
to encourage and track students participating in segues to see if they
continue to develop interests in science.
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