Teaching of Botany in higher education: representations and discussions of undergraduate students

The teaching of botany is characterised as being taught in a technical and uninteresting way for students. The objective of this work is to find out what students think of the way Botany is taught and their views on this as students and in the future as teachers. To achieve this objective an open questionnaire was given to first year undergraduate students studying Biological Sciences. Two hundred and twenty one students from four different Universities filled in the questionnaire. From the results collated, students in our sample were in favour of a more practical teaching of Botany, however if they were the teachers they would teach more theoretically. This shift of position (from student to teacher) brought about a change in the way Botany would be taught, as it changed the perspective, in spite of the players being the same. This work has pointed out that the representation of a concept can vary depending on the subject’s point of view and that it is important to pay close attention to the training of these future Biology teachers. CIEC – Research Centre on Child Studies, IE, UMinho (FCT R&D unit 317), Portugal National Funds through the FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) and co-financed by European Regional Development Funds (FEDER) through the Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Program (POCI) through CIEC (Research Centre on Child Studies, of the University of Minho) with the reference POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007562 Strategic Project UID/CED/00317/2013