THE ISSUE:

Using student-active learning to investigate the costs and benefits of crop biotechnology for humans and the environment

ECOLOGICAL CONTENT:

Human induced alterations to ecosystems, beginning at the genetic level; persistence of escaped transgenes; chemical pesticide usage; and gene transfer and resistance

STUDENT-ACTIVE APPROACHES:

citizen’s argument, formal group work, pairs check, and pairs share

STUDENT ASSESSMENTS:

minute paper, oral presentation, essay, concept map

AUTHORS:

Dara Zycherman^1* and Jason Taylor²

1 - U.S. Green Building Council, 1015 18th Street NW, Washington, DC 20036, 202-828-7422 x156, dzycherman@usgbc.org

2 - Ecological Society of America, 1400 Spring St., Suite 330, Silver Spring, MD, 20910-2749, 301-588-3873, x311, fx: 301-588-4693 jason@esa.org

* corresponding author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

This submission was created as part of an ecological educational internship at the Ecological Society of America by Dara Zycherman. We thank Percy Schmeiser, a farmer who has been negatively impacted by crop biotechnology, for initial inspiration to pursue this topic. In addition, partial funding came from a subcontract to ESA and Jason Taylor from National Science Foundation, NSF-DUE-0127388. This submission has benefited from comments by TIEE Editors and an anonymous reviewer.

CITATION:

Zycherman, D., and J. Taylor. August 2004, posting date. What Are the Ecological Impacts of Plant Biotechnology? Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology, Vol. 2: Issues Figure Set #1 [online]. http://tiee.ecoed.net/vol/v2/issues/figure_sets/biotech/abstract.html