On January 26th, New York Botanical Garden, Florida International University, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, and Montgomery Botanical Center offered a Cycad Biology Course to teachers from Miami-Dade County Public Schools. The course was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and taught by Dennis Stevenson (NYBG), Michael Calonje (MBC), Javier Francisco-Ortega (FIU-Fairchild), and Patrick Griffith (MBC).
Nine school teachers and Nicolas Espinosa, National Science Foundation Intern from FIU, attended the course. NYBG, FIU, FTBG, and MBC have been working together to research the genetics of Zamia in the Caribbean. Educational outreach is an important component of this project and the organizations involved are working to make the new information from this project available to the community.
The workshop included classroom lectures and laboratory demonstrations in the Nixon Smiley Meeting Room along with using the living collections of MBC.
Griffith was thrilled with the workshop: “This is an awesome group of teachers — I only wish I could have learned about cycads when I was in grade school! Linking our current science with local educators is a great way to reach the next generation of botanists.”