Botanical Lights or The Light Show as a Teaching Technique

Almost every large university has a botany or biology course specifically designed for nonscience majors. These courses are populated primarily by students fulfilling various college requirements. As a result, many of the students lack any deep interest in biology and little involvement in the course. The University of California at Berkeley has a number of such courses. For some years I have been the instructor in one of these offered by the Department of Botany-Botany 10, Plant Biology. I have tried a variety of methods and approaches designed to make the course more interesting and involve the students more deeply in the subject. Starting with the usual lecture and laboratory approach, I later modified this to lectures plus an open laboratory demonstration and finally, to the audio-tutorial approach I now use. Each of these changes resulted in improved student relationship to the course but still did not reach the basic problem of emotional motivation. The bases for a lack of motivation were many: (1) students in Botany 10 at Berkeley did not like the fact that the course was required; (2) they felt that it was not relevant to their needs. Unfortunately, as each student has a different concept of what is relevant, it is impossible to tailor a course that would be emotionally satisfying to the majority of the students on this ground. (3) To most, biology was a rather unpleasant experience that they had suffered through in high school. Regardless of the particular approach used on them, they seemed to have entered the university feeling that biology meant incomprehensible terms and innumerable concepts. For these reasons, this group of students presents possibly the greatest challenge in science teaching. If somehow a change in their basic orientation toward the course-from negative to positive-could be made, we would go far toward achieving the students' acceptance of the subject. In a discussion with Lincoln Taiz, a teaching assistant in the Department of Botany, the idea of using a straight emotional approach to the students was raised. This approach was through the use of a light show. Light shows have been around for a number of years in the entertainment business, particularly associated with rock music. Usually they are given in relation to dances or rock concerts and a variety of lights and images are flashed around the room on the walls, on the ceiling, on the floor, and on the dancers. Strobe lights may be employed and the central idea is to augment the impact of the rock music with a visual environment that appeals to the emotions of the participants. When done well, the effect is striking and the emotional impact is great. How can such a theatrical device be used in teaching such a staid subject as botany? First, we decided certain aspects would have to be modified. The emphasis would be put on the visual side of the performance and the music, while important, would form a background rather than the central theme of the show. Second, we would concentrate on using 35-mm slides and 16-mm motion pictures and restrict the incidental lighting to a minimum. Outside of that, however, the concept of a light show would remain the same-it was to be a purely emotional experience. We decided to forego any attempt to transmit factual knowledge. The idea was to overwhelm the students with the beauty and mystery of a biological subject and to set them up to receive the factual data later in the