{"id":795,"date":"2018-12-08T05:17:18","date_gmt":"2018-12-08T05:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/?p=795"},"modified":"2018-12-08T05:17:18","modified_gmt":"2018-12-08T05:17:18","slug":"smith-college-botanic-gardens-as-campus-school-classrooms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/2018\/12\/08\/smith-college-botanic-gardens-as-campus-school-classrooms\/","title":{"rendered":"Smith College Botanic Gardens as Campus School Classrooms"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI love being a kind of Willy Wonka of plants, saying \u2018welcome to my magical world of dirt and leaves and tactile, experiential learning,\u2019\u201d<\/b> shared Gaby Immerman, landscape and education specialist at the Smith College Botanic Gardens. \u00a0Seated in a lab classroom at the back of the Conservatory, through a room bursting with mums and past a tall banana tree, Gaby sat on a stool next to her closet of microscopes and spoke with passion about her role as \u201ca portal, a point of engagement\u201d at Campus School and beyond.<\/p>\n

Now in her nineteenth year at Smith, Gaby has many roles: college lab instructor, director of the Botanic Gardens\u2019 summer internship program, and lecturer, teaching biology courses called Plants in the Landscape and Botany for Gardeners. She is also a past Campus School parent who \u201cfloated up\u201d through the school with her son, collaborating with teachers to integrate the Gardens into classroom curricula.<\/p>\n

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Gaby brings to Smith a wealth of experience in her field. She started working in a plant nursery at the age of fifteen and knew, from that moment, that horticulture was her passion. From working on farms to mowing lawns, Gaby immersed herself in the outdoors while negotiating \u201cthe feeling that there was this disconnect between what I loved to do, and what I was supposed to do.\u201d In her twenties, in New York City, Gaby delved into community gardening and realized, for the first time, that \u201chorticulture could have community organizing and social justice [components]\u2026 it wasn\u2019t just planting shrubs or raking leaves.\u201d<\/p>\n

At twenty-nine, Gaby ventured to Smith, bringing with her a wealth of experiential knowledge that bolstered multidisciplinary learning. \u201cMy work experiences very much underpin my teaching,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m a very strong voice to young people about pursuing what you love to do\u2026. the students really appreciate that, and it makes our classes stand apart from classes that are abstract, critical-thinking, and theory-based. I\u2019m a little bit subversive in that I am so skills-based, and it\u2019s fun to be that outpost in [students\u2019] very heady week.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hearing Gaby speak about her educational involvement with Campus School, however, it is clear that skills and intellect cohere, both in Gaby and her students. Working with first grade teachers to facilitate a year-long tree study in which students pick one or two trees on campus to observe, draw, and research, Gaby shares with teachers her college-level phenology curriculum, in which \u201cstudents observe recurrent biological phenomena,\u201d and works with them to adapt that curriculum for first graders. Whether it is the weeping beech outside of the Hopkins dormitory, (\u201can amazing gumdrop of a tree\u201d), or the maple right outside of the Campus School entrance, Gaby provides \u201cdirect education, advising, coaching, and technical assistance\u201d to students and teachers alike.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look at a tree in the summer, there are no buds present,\u201d she shared. \u201cBut right around the end of August or the beginning of September, the tree looks the same otherwise, but the buds form, so leaves are still on the trees and they haven\u2019t turned colors yet, but right at the axil, where the leaf petiole meets the stem, there\u2019s a bud sitting there. [We think about questions such as] \u2018What\u2019s a bud? Why did it appear? Why did it appear in September? What are buds all about? Did you know that yellows and oranges are there all along, and that the green disintegrates?\u2019 We talk about temperate dormant strategies. If you\u2019re a first grade teacher who\u2019s not a botanist, you might not necessarily observe that in September, if you get students out there early enough, you might be able to show them the leaves before buds are present, and then as they form. Even though I\u2019m not there at the tree observation, I\u2019ve kind of coached teachers a little bit to know how to guide their first graders and what leading questions they could ask them.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Moving up in grade level, Gaby works with fourth grade teacher Tiphareth Ananda, who brings her students to the Botanic Garden\u2019s Lyman Conservatory to deepen their studies of the rainforest, environmental conservation, and changing biomes. There, they learn about plant adaptations in the tropical and desert rooms, the latter of which houses plants that \u201chave such dramatic, unusual adaptations\u2014big, fat succulent stems and thorns rather than leaves\u2026 really, really dramatic responses to their environment.\u201d During the investigation, Gaby and Tiphareth split the class in half and ask both groups to come up with \u201cthree strategies for plant adaptations in a dry environment, three strategies for plant adaptations in a moist, shady environment\u2026 and then we bust out the microscopes and do a leaf inquiry,\u201d in which Gaby shares leaves that have unusual textures or patterns. \u201cI\u2019ll use microscopes with first graders too, if enough parents come along!\u201d she added, emphasizing the ways in which the Botanic Gardens are spaces to be shared.<\/p>\n

And Gaby points out that those Botanic Gardens extend far beyond the building by the pond, the site \u00a0that most people envision when they picture the Garden. While Lyman Conservatory is home to twelve greenhouses\u2014nine that are open to the public– the entire campus, including the Campus School, is an arboretum. Every \u201cwoody\u201d plant is labeled and planfully curated in the same way that species in the greenhouses are. Beyond that, there are the \u201cnamed gardens\u201d: the President\u2019s House garden; the Capen Garden; the dwarf conifer garden; the Richardson perennial border; the systematics garden, whose 2,000 plant species offer \u201can explosion of complexity and diversity.\u201d \u201cA Botanic Garden is a museum of plants,\u201d Gaby said. \u201cWe have a living collection. Every single piece is called an accession, which means it is an entity within the collection: it has a number, it has a record in a database\u2026 a \u2018known provenance,\u2019 as we call it in the trade\u2026 where it came from, who purchased it, who propagated it. Furthermore, if you think about [and compare us to] the Art Museum, there\u2019s a curator. Somebody\u2019s making those decisions: they are both accessioning and deaccessioning. For example, we have a very strong collection of what you call economic plants: coffee, bananas, cinchona– the plant that you get quinine from– and the original rubber plant used before we had synthetic rubber\u2026 Every director has a particular interest, or passion, or philosophy. And we\u2019re having lots of discussions about good, thorny, complicated political questions about what is getting featured.\u201d<\/p>\n

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It is the \u201cknown provenance\u201d that makes the Botanic Gardens valuable and credible for conservation and research. First graders at Campus School have the opportunity to research the surfaces of leaves in the same rooms where a cancer researcher worked to improve the breast cancer drug Taxol. \u201cThere was a [scientist] studying the genus Taxus, which is basically bushes\u2014people call them \u2018yews\u2019\u2014the basic shrubs that are outside of nearly every bank or apartment building. His research question was \u2018Is there more Taxol in the Taxus from Mexico, or the Taxus from England, or the Taxus from Japan?\u2019 and we have them all, so he didn\u2019t have to go to, or send for, plant materials from all over the world; he just came to Smith and took snips from our plants and analyzed those in the labs for levels of Taxol, and then that [allowed for] a legitimate paper because of the records we keep. We could say to him definitively\u2014yes, this one came from Mexico and Rob\u2019s the guy who brought the cutting in 1982.\u201d<\/p>\n

The diversity and abundance of the Gardens, along with their utility, allows students and teachers to engage deeply with the world around them, and to think carefully about how that world connects to other communities and environments. \u201cThe opportunity that is presented by going to elementary school on a college campus that has a Botanic Garden, and an Art Museum, and a river, and a spatial analysis lab, and all the other amazing resources that Campus School has access to,\u201d Gaby shared in closing, \u201cI deeply believe that [those] relationships can and should be maximized.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Written by Brittany Collins <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI love being a kind of Willy Wonka of plants, saying \u2018welcome to my magical world of dirt and leaves and tactile, experiential learning,\u2019\u201d shared Gaby Immerman, landscape and education […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":666,"featured_media":796,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/666"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":830,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions\/830"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/labschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}