Talking About Plants - Comments of Primary School Groups Looking at Plants As Exhibits

TALKING ABOUT PLANTS - COMMENTS OF PRIMARY SCHOOL GROUPS LOOKING AT PLANTS AS EXHIBITS IN A BOTANICAL GARDEN

Sue Dale Tunnicliffe

Homerton College, Cambridge, CB2 2PH

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Cardiff University, September 7-10 2000.

Abstract

Little work has been done on the early experiences of children looking at plants as exhibits in a botanical garden. What do children bring to such visits? How do they interpret and communicate their experiences? How do the accompanying adults enhance or inhibit the children's spontaneous interaction with the plants? When school groups visit a botanical garden, they do so with curricular objectives in mind but are these addressed?

Conversations of groups of primary school children were collected while they visited the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew and looked at plant specimens, the majority of which were displayed in the Princess of Wales Greenhouse. Transcripts were analysed using a systemic network which yielded the major topics of conversations. From the analysis it is shown that children talk spontaneously about the easily observed features of plants such as colour, shape and smell, and offer past experiences with garden plants. When cued by adults or other children in the group, children attend to less obvious aspects. There were no differences between the content of conversations of groups with boys-only or girls-only or mixed groups. Key Stage 2 groups made significantly more comments focused on plants than the younger children. Implications for teachers and parents in preparing and conducting these visits are presented.

Key words Primary, botany, field-trip

Introduction

Living organisms are a key part of the environment, yet we little understand how children perceive them. Moreover, a person’s attitude towards and understandings of ‘the environment are profoundly shaped by their attitudes towards, experiences and understandings of living organisms’ (Tunnicliffe and Reiss, 1999). Plants are key members of the environment. This paper considers the response of pupils to plants in a botanical garden where exotic plants are exhibited. Such a garden is unlike the familiar domestic garden and the plants on exhibit are mostly exotic.

Plants, and to a lesser extent animals, are an important part of the scenery of children's' lives. Children notice these biological organisms as they walk around both inside and outside. They meet plants in the form of pot plants or cut flowers; as vegetables and fruit in food and they see images of plants in a myriad of places such as pictures, fabrics, illustrations in books and on greetings cards. Children have understanding of vegetation which contributes to their understanding of their environment and urban children have preferences for aspects of nature involving plants (Simmons, 1994).

Living organisms have an important place in children’s lives. They learn about animals and plants from their earliest moments (Keil, 1979), although animals form the highest proportion of words in a child’s first vocabulary (Rinsland, 1946). Children learn to identify an organism using a basic or everyday name of the culture in which they are living (Rosch & Mervis, 1975; Brown, 1958). Tull (1994) found that children from a small university town in central Texas in the USA named plants in the field with a generic name but this term was not one that would be acceptable to science teachers. Moreover, Tull found that the allocation of a name covered up the individual having to admit that they did not know the ‘correct’ one. However, knowing the accepted scientific reasons for classifying in the scientific manner, as well as the necessary appropriate vocabulary, is a difficult set of concepts over which to acquire mastery.

Ryman (1974) showed that the inability of eleven year old children to classify the biological exemplars they were given as a member or non-member of a taxonomic group suggests that the children had no grasp of the defining attributes required to perform such a task. Moreover, Braund (1998) showed that children’s thinking about animals in science lessons change as they develop and that the youngest children are concerned with shape, form and size. Children follow a similar pattern when looking at plants as exhibits as they do when looking at animals commenting upon salient features (Tunnicliffe, 1995, 1999), although comparisons with what they are familiar form a higher proportion of their comments. Striking features, as shape and colour, become criterial for children's constructions of particular animals and plants and become incorporated in their mental models of different kinds of species. Trowbridge and Mintzes (1985) maintain that '... students consider ambiguous and often conflicting pieces of information when classifying animals, ultimately arriving at a decision based on relative size or perceived importance of body parts’. It is likely that children follow the same pattern when classifying plants. Bell (1981) showed that children did not consider trees as plants. Children recognise plants and animals and name them with an everyday name or a descriptive names if they have not the 'correct' vocabulary. When failing to recall or invent a descriptive name, children refer to an unfamiliar specimen as 'plant', although the term 'plant' is used to refer most often to the flowering plants in a manner similar to the usage of 'animal' to mean 'mammal' (Bell, 1981) and to mammals as 'animal' or a family name such as 'cat'. Other vertebrate classes are called by that general class name unless a specific name is known. Hence, penguins and vultures but 'bird' for any unknown specimen , sharks but 'fish' for other unrecognised species (Tunnicliffe, 1995).

Students learn about plants and animals from their family, be it someone trying to eradicate moss from the lawn, planting out flower beds or hanging baskets or just admiring plants and animals seen on walks. We discovered this information from research interviews with two separate cohorts of 36 students from 5 years to 14 years (unpublished data Tunnicliffe 1998). School is not a place identified by the children as a source of their information and pupils admit to learning little from books or the media but a lot from their own everyday observations (Tunnicliffe and Reiss, 1999a). Our research interviews were conducted as structured individual oral questionnaires in a classroom with each child of that sample separately and with six botanical specimens and another set of 36 children with animal specimens. Even though we learnt a lot about the student's knowledge of plants and animals, we did not learn about their spontaneous comments about these organisms when presented as exhibits.

Children have a mental model of items which they express through their conversations and drawings and writing. This expressed model is what we teachers have to base our assessment of that pupils' knowledge and understanding. Thus, the comments of pupils are important (Tunnicliffe and Reiss, 1999a). The spontaneous comments of primary and family groups at animal exhibits are known (Tunnicliffe, 1995) and at skeletons in a museums (Tunnicliffe, 1998) and in botanical gardens (Tunnicliffe, 1999). It is equally important for botanical or zoological garden educators and for school teachers to know what their pupils are likely to notice and comment about when they visit plants and animals as exhibits so that meaningful learning interactions can be planned, based on the spontaneous interest revealed in the comments of the children. Their expressed model is that which catches their attention and can be used as a trigger for a teaching/learning dialogue by educators at the time and subsequently back in class. Likewise, a visit to live animals or plants may be the stimulus which starts children off into the study of biology.

Young children appreciate plants but gradually adopt the adult attitude that vegetation is wordless and utilitarian (Schneekloth, 1989)) whilst it appears that urban children in the USA children do have apprehensions about visiting natural sites and have preferences for certain sites for visits (Simmons, 1994). Thus the children begin their visit with feelings about the sites and the nature of the visit. They also have some knowledge of plants from their own lives. 'Plant' is a term restricted in everyday science to refer to the small herbaceous Angiosperms also referred to as s flowers (Ryman, 1974) and Bell (as Stead, 1980) found that children aged 9-15 had a much narrower meaning of the word plant than did biologists. A tree for example is not considered as a plant and everyday grouping of plants such as weeds, vegetables and seeds were considered equivalent categories to 'plant' not subsets. Moreover, historical ideas which are not part of the consensus of scientific knowledge such that plants obtain their food through their roots (Barker, 1995) persist within society and thus within the children.

As biology educators, it is important for us to know what children and their accompanying adults do notice, and for us to use this information as the baseline about which we design and deliver educational strategies which help children in their construction of biological knowledge. Taxonomy is a key element of biological learning, with its embedded knowledge inherent within the taxonomic hierarchies. Askham (1976) showed that young children can classify plants but do not use one particular method but particular look for salient features such as prominent leaves, colour or tactile features in their groupings. Gottfried, (1981) raised the question as to whether children did learn on school trips whereas Tunnicliffe, Lucas and Osborne (1997) inquire whether the museum visit is a missed educational opportunity.

This paper reports on the content of the conversations generated by school groups during educational visits to a zoos and botanical garden. Furthermore, one of the functions of botanical gardens is to develop public understanding of biodiversity and conservation biology whose foundations lie in identification of specimens and recognition of criterial attributes.

We, as educators, can consider the extent to which viewing plants is enabling visitors to attend to these issues and whether the messages explicit within the exhibits reach the visitors. Listening to and analysing the unsolicited conversations of visitors is one way to ascertain whether or not this occurs.

Methodology

The data were collected at the Royal Botanical Garden Kew, England. In total 412 conversations were collected over a number of days. All the school groups were from primary schools and the pupils were mainly either aged 7 or aged 9 or 11. Conversations of sub groups of a class, pupils and adults or just pupils, were recorded verbatim in a notebook. Tape recording had proved too difficult because of extraneous noises such as a waterfall. Immediately after teach visit the written conversations were transcribed by the same person. Permission to work with the groups had been obtained in advance from the schools involved. To facilitate the analysis of the transcripts the data were considered in terms of units of conversations. A unit of conversation was defined as the 'group conversation in front of any one exhibit from the beginning of the conversation until it ceased'. The units of conversation were identified during the typing of the transcripts from the voices of the different members of the group. Two examples of a unit of conversation are shown below.

Year one children (5 to 6 years old)

105 / Adult / You can see weeds in between the plants
Boy 1 / There's a flower there's
Boy 2 / I can't see any red ones
Boy 1 / Ah yes- I can.

Year 4 children ( 7 to 8 years old)

115 / Teacher / Through there are lots of flowers- what are they called?
Girl / Roses
Teacher / We'll see some more later
Boy / I had a yellow one in my Grandmas and Grandpa's garden
Teacher / Really? We're going to see them.

There are a great many ways of analysing conversations (Tunnicliffe and Reiss, 1999). A systemic network was chosen. This is a means of grouping or categorising things, in this case conversations, to be a parsimonious representation of the data, while preserving the relationships between categories in such a way that comparisons can be made between groups. It is a type of analysis that changes qualitative into quantifiable data and each topic of conversation was coded according to the systemic network developed from the work of Bliss, Monk and Ogborn (Bliss, Monk, & Ogborn, 1983)and which had been worked out from pilot studies in which 50 conversations about animals had been collected and inspected for patterns of content and form (Tunnicliffe, 1995) and modified for plants by subsisting the categories for the equivalent botanical ones. The preliminary inspection and categorising of the pilot conversations showed that the visitors looked at specific attributes of the plants, asked question and made statements about what they already knew, commented on their own experiences with the plants and talked about their whereabouts and gave instructions to each other. The network can be regarded analogously as the sets of nested boxes into which the researcher puts each part of the conversation and sections are presented in Figures 1. There were 56 categories in this network some of which are shown in figure 1. A bar, '[', indicates that an attribute may be either/or but not a member of both categories, whilst a bracket, '{', indicates one of a number of categories which an animal may have.

The major categories of the network were, ‘management and social comments’ orders such as 'Come here', or social ones such as 'Sam...... ' ; ‘ostensive comments’ such as 'Look!', 'Where is it?', 'There!'; ‘affective attitudes’ ; ‘exhibit access’ or ‘orientation comments’ in which visitors searched for or located the plants and 'exhibit focused and Interpretative comments, which included knowledge source comments such as questions and references to a source of the information proffered (called knowledge source comments);

A theoretical 'waste basket category' for topics such as security alert announcement comments and which were uncategorised was provided. The comments directly referring to the exhibits were divided into ‘other exhibit’ comments, such as artefacts which were features of exhibits such as gravel or a statue or animals seen amongst the plants such as frogs in the pond) and those which focused on plants

Exhibit focused comments divided into 2 subordinate categories. Namely, other exhibit comments’-those about other aspects of the exhibit, such as a pond or the label and photograph, and plant focused comments. The plant-focused category was subcategorised into four subordinate groups:

1. Environmental comments referring to the natural habitat or endangered status or conservation issues of the species;

2. Comments about the plants’ structure;

3. Comments about the plants’ physiology (equivalent to animal behaviour);

4. Comments about the plants’ names. These included the everyday names, e.g. pineapple; category names such as 'plant', carnivorous plants, Alpine plant, cactus; common names, for example Living Stone Plants, Giant Amazon Water Lilly and occasionally the botanical name for example Lithops species.

The conversations were coded using the number of the relevant category which was written above the appropriate words on t the transcript. Each category of comment had a number allocated to it. Hence an anatomical comment was number 17 which subsumed more detailed anatomical comments, namely leaves, 18, flower and fruits, 19, stem, 20, form of growth (spiky, sticky), 21, dimensions, 22, other 23. A conversation would be coded as follows. The numbers of the coding system are written over the relevant words. Not all the word have been categorised here for ease of reading. Subsequently an entry was typed into the columns within the spread sheet of Minitab. Hence a sentence from one of the above conversations received the following codings.

115 / Teacher / 6 19 44
Through there are lots of flowers- what are they called?
Girl / 29/32
Roses

If more than one comment of a particular category (e.g. a name) occurred within a single conversation, it not scored again. Hence the analysis shows the number of conversations within which a topic is mentioned not the number of overall times that a topic is mentioned. issues of the species.

Insert Figure 1

'Oh' is an emotive response, categorised as 39 and in the super ordinate category of affective comments. 'Look' is both a management command (2) as well as an ostensive comment (4) which is part of the category of Exhibit Access comments showing other visitors where to look at an exhibit. The size of the plant, its dimension, is 21, part of the super ordinate category of anatomy, 17, whilst lilies is a naming comments in the super ordinate category names (28) but is an everyday name (32) as well as category name (34)

Results

Two hundred and thirty conversations were of groups with only male pupils, 143 of girls only and 39 were mixed. One hundred and thirty eight of the conversations also contained an adult, 62 of the conversations had a teacher, the otter adults were chaperones, parents, governors for example. Two hundred and seventy four conversations were pupils alone, except the researcher standing nearby but who was not included in the conversations.