Instructor: Paul Gepts, Department of Plant Sciences, College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences
Description: Plants play an often underestimated role in our societies. This includes not only our modern, Western society but also local or indigenous societies on other continents. In addition to the obvious roles in feeding, plants play ain important role in our daily care (e.g., shampoo, soap, lipstick), clothing (in addition to cotton, other examples include bark of different trees, stinging nettle, kapok, pineapple, mulberry, and various dyes, etc.), housing (softwood vs. hardwood timber, roofing material, furniture wood, upholstery, flooring), medicine (against pain, skin conditions, coughs & colds, high blood pressure, cancer, HIV/AIDS; anaesthetics, contraceptives, abortifacients), transportation (rubber, reeds, woods, hemp, biofuels), and other uses (paper, crayons, sports, music instruments; ornamental). Over the ten weeks, students will explore these different roles of plants. by classroom discussions but also visits to local stores to identify plant products that are commercialized. The following learning goals are proposed: a) This seminar proposes to expose students to plants primarily by their utilitarian role. It will serve as an introduction to further classes in the curriculum that deal with plants in a more detailed way, from a biochemical, physiological, genetic and agronomic viewpoint. This approach is based on my successful experience in PLBI43, Evolution of Crop Plants, which focuses exclusively on domesticated plants; b) Students will learn to identify various sources of information, including but not limited to personal observations in various settings (e.g., labels on products), stores (including farmers markets, supermarkets), the internet, and the library; and c) Students will learn to summarize their observations and information in short I-page reports on weekly basis.
Format: There will be a one-hour a week meeting where the results of the previous weeks research will be discussed and the topic for the next week will be introduced. Furthermore, students will be required to read and visit sites in and around Davis to gather information for each week's meeting. This will take an additional 3 hours. Grading: Weekly written reports: 66%; class participation: 34%. No final exam. Pass/no-pass grading.
About the Instructor: Paul Gepts is a faculty in the Department of Plant Sciences. The focus of his research and teaching program is on the biodiversity of crop plants and the factors that influence them, such as the domestication process. He has taught courses in plant genetics and introductory genetics at the graduate level and a course on the evolution and domestication of crop plants at the undergraduate level. The latter course (PLB 143) is the inspiration for this freshman seminar. Although PLB 143 is a course for seniors/juniors, few students have a knowledge of the contributions of plants to human life.