Botany: Growing Plants, Growing Strategies, and Growing People

by James Beck

From the Editor: These remarks were presented to the National Federation of the Blind of Kansas annual meeting on November 3, 2018. Dr. James Beck teaches in the department of biology at Wichita State University. It is always encouraging to find a teacher willing to go above and beyond in helping his or her blind students achieve. It is even more encouraging when one is listening to Dr. Beck, who is not only a teacher willing to but actually eager and enthusiastic about the time and effort involved to blaze a trail and create the best ways to teach advanced botany concepts to a blind student. Whether this has been done before we do not know, but when he and his student couldn’t find others who had done it, they worked to invent techniques and to share them. Here is what he has to say:

I’d like to thank Emily Schlenker and all of you for the invitation to speak here today. This is a new experience for me, not just because I’ve never spoken to a mainly blind audience before, but also because I’m not accustomed to speaking about my teaching. I’ve given many presentations about my research, which is in the field of plant systematics. Systematics is simply the discipline of biology, where we attempt to document how many species there are on earth and how they are related to one another evolutionarily. In other words, my job is to help figure out plant biodiversity and plant evolution. I’ve been at Wichita State since 2013, and I have an active research lab in which both master’s and undergraduate students participate.

My teaching at WSU includes courses in ecology, evolution, botany, and general biology. My first experience with a student who is blind was with Emily when she took my general biology course last Spring. I team-taught that course with another professor—Mary Liz Jameson, and since Mary Liz had the first half of the semester, she really got the ball rolling, establishing one-on-one study sessions with Emily and working with the Disability Services office to produce tactile diagrams and Brailled lectures. There were delays at times with getting Emily’s Brailled/tactile materials, but as long as these were in place, that class went smoothly. Looking back I think we had already identified the four key ingredients for a successful class:

1. Materials prepared in advance: Brailled lectures, screen readable versions of the textbook, and tactile versions of key diagrams are fundamental. It’s critical that these are available to the student well before the material is presented in lecture, and this requires a lot of communication between the professor and the media resources folks that prepare these specialized documents. If these are in place, it gives the student time to read ahead a bit and (perhaps most importantly) helps minimize that feeling of the unknown that all good students have. Good students worry that really difficult material is just around the corner, even if they have the entire text at their disposal. I would assume that this anxious feeling is even more pronounced for a blind student, particularly if he/she has minimal opportunity to read materials ahead of lecture.

2. One-on-one instruction: In my experience Emily does two things during class: makes use of the tactile diagrams when we get to them, and listens. In particular, she seems to prioritize listening to and understanding what I’m saying, and for this and practical reasons she can’t make detailed notes, specifically drawings. There are also limits to what can be conveyed in a tactile figure, and there are many figures that simply can’t be made tactile. Some images, especially photos of complex structures, are simply too busy to be comprehended in tactile form. For that reason we decided from the start to have standing meeting times for one-on-one instruction. These typically lasted one to two hours, in which we’d go over any topics from the most recent lectures that were confusing, paying particular attention to topics conveyed in tactile diagrams. Having a standing meeting is good for both student and professor. The student can count on that extra instruction each week which reduces anxiety, and it allows the professor to reliably set aside that time and keep other blocks of time free for research and other activities.

3. Creativity: There are of course limits to what can be presented simultaneously to both sighted and blind students and limits to the ways a blind student’s knowledge can be tested on an exam. In these instances the instructor needs to come up with alternative but equally rigorous ways to present material and test a student who is blind. In general biology there were really very few of these limits because the exams were multiple-choice-based, but in my next course creativity was a daily task.

4. Student attitude: There’s no getting around the fact that these three key ingredients I’ve just mentioned require a major time investment on the part of the instructor. However, in my experience this is totally worth it if the student is eager to learn and adapt when things don't work out perfectly. But this would be a nightmare scenario for a professor if all this work went toward a student who was not willing to put in the time, was hostile, entitled, or even if they were simply the kind of passive personality so common in many of my students. It’s hard to overstate the importance of student attitude—teaching someone who wants to learn can be a genuine joy even if it is a ton of work.

Late in the Spring semester Emily told me that she was going to take two upper-division biology courses in the fall, one of which being my Vascular Plants course (Biolog 502). The idea of a botany course may conjure up images of students happily gazing at flowers, but this is a dense, technical course where we discuss the evolution and diversity of all green plants—that’s everything from green algae to redwood trees. To do this we cover a wide variety of topics, including how to reconstruct evolutionary history from DNA sequence data, basic descriptive morphological terms for plants, major evolutionary transitions along the green plant phylogeny, and detailed discussions of numerous plant families. Students find this course difficult; in fact the last time I taught it in 2016, 47 percent of students either dropped the course or failed it. So this is considerably more difficult relative to general biology.

We're also adding many activities that require creative solutions. For instance, how does one relate the key information from a very busy image under a microscope? How does one describe plant structure that is too small to be tactile? And how does one test a blind student over this material? Luckily we already had a game plan. As with the previous course, we knew it would take a lot of advance preparation of materials, devoted one-on-one study time, creativity, and a positive student attitude. And I think this approach is working.

First the materials. A real eye-opener for me was the almost complete lack of Brailled and tactile materials for botany, a fact that I strongly believe extends to most upper division science coursework. One of the first things I did was put the word out on professional listservs and social media: does anyone have experience teaching botany to a student who is blind, and/or do you know of any relevant materials? Absolute radio silence. The only responses came from people who wanted me to contact them if I came across anything. This was alarming but also pretty exhilarating—it became clear that we were among the first people to attempt this kind of instruction, and it’s exciting to do something new. So we knew that we’d have to develop our own materials, and my saving grace were the folks at the WSU’s Media Resources Center, specifically Jay Castor in the Academic Accessibility and Accommodations unit. These folks have been able to make essentially any tactile/Brailled materials I need, but they also pushed me to prepare as much in advance as I could. This was critical, particularly since each of my PowerPoint lectures needed to be modified to make it accessible. This involved adding alt text to all images, making sure all slide text was in text boxes, adding titles to all slides, and choosing slides to convert to tactile diagrams. This takes several hours per lecture, and the MRC folks got me trained and going with this early in the Summer. If they hadn’t been proactive, this semester would have been a train wreck.

They also identified an elegant, versatile solution for making tactile materials—the “Pictures in a Flash” (PIAF) system. PIAF allows most anything that can be photocopied to be made tactile. The MRC folks could adapt figures from my botany textbook, print them on the special PIAF paper, and then run them through a heater which causes the printed portion to swell and become tactile. They’ve made many such figures for my class in this way. The same system also made it possible for me to draw figures and make them tactile. Again, all I had to do was make an original image, copy it onto the PIAF paper, and heat it to make it tactile. This is how I relate complex images and plant structure to Emily, by making my own drawn versions of these images tactile. Emily and I then review these images, and she adds titles to them with Brailled adhesive labels. PIAF was a lifesaver and has been easily the most important technical approach we’ve taken.

Emily and I also established and stuck to a schedule for one-on-one instruction. The botany course meets on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, so we have a study session on Wednesday and Friday mornings. This gives me enough time to prepare a few custom-drawn tactile materials that fill gaps in the previous evening’s lecture, which Emily and I discuss along with any other topics she found confusing. This typically takes around an hour per session.

I mentioned creativity before, and this course has required a number of creative solutions. One came from my colleague Melanie Link-Perez (Oregon State), who suggested that when we discuss flower structure I could have all students make flowers that matched various technical specifications or were representative of a particular plant family. The key here is that the sighted students learn by doing, and the flowers they make become instant tactile teaching material for Emily. I’ve already mentioned the use of PIAF to reproduce figures from the text and also make custom ones. These have been useful on exams because I can ask the sighted students to identify portions of an image of a slide, and then make a tactile version of that same image and ask Emily to identify the same things. Some exam questions also require dissections, and when these are needed we do an interactive dissection. Emily tells me exactly what/how to dissect and what to look for; then based on my feedback, she answers questions about the given structure.

I think the most creative (and maybe the most fun) solution for an exam question involved a phylogeny (evolutionary tree). The question listed eighteen items—these were either “tips” on a phylogenetic tree or names for internal branches, and the students had to draw a tree connecting and including all these items. Sighted students typically find this question quite difficult but are not physically limited; they can simply draw the phylogeny. For Emily I decided to provide a set of cut poster board strips of various sizes along with Brailled versions of the items. Using these materials Emily had to construct a tactile version of the same phylogeny on a large table. That worked quite well.

That exam question and countless other moments in this course have required the positive student attitude I mentioned before. Emily is genuinely interested in the material, views learning as a reward unto itself, and takes both praise and criticism seriously. That attitude has made it not only possible, but also enjoyable for me and the folks at the MRC to provide this instruction.