Class Research Projects
Find below short summaries of research projects conceived and undertaken by my undergraduate classes. Several of the projects were undertaken in coordination with and data sharing among classes at other universities! Note that most of the classes listed below are low-level classes with no prerequisites, and students ranged from freshmen to seniors. Find instructions for some of these methods under My Open-Source Guides for Teaching, found in the drop-down menu under Course & Teaching Resources above.
Using Herbarium Specimens
to Track Climate Change
When: May 2015
Who: 6 undergraduate students in ANTH 213 Ethnobotany: Plants & Peoples
Where: A.C. Moore Herbarium, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Plants collected in South Carolina.
In the summer of 2015, the Anthropology 213 Ethnobotany class at the University of South Carolina conducted phenophase research at the A.C. Moore Herbarium on campus. Phenology, defined by the National Phenology Network (NPN), refers to key seasonal changes in plants and animals from year to year. We recorded phenophase related to flowering for six herbs and shrubs that grow in South Carolina. Dr. John Nelson, director of the herbarium, helped students learn to recognize the phenophases displayed on each herbarium specimen. We spent two class periods at the herbarium, during which most students hand-recorded 50-60 specimens for their species. They entered their data into Excel spread sheets. Following instructions posted by the California Phenology Project on the NPN web page, students created scatter plots and mapped trendlines. We found the most consistent trends in when peak flowering occurs across species: peak flowering is occurring earlier in the year through time (about 1-2 days per decade). We examined the following species (range in years): Itea virginica (1938-2013), Ligustrum sinense (1957-2014), Nutallanthus canadensis (1935-1996), Prunella vulgaris (1953-2013), Solanum carolinense, and Vaccineum stamineum (1936-2011).
Who: 6 undergraduate students in ANTH 213 Ethnobotany: Plants & Peoples
Where: A.C. Moore Herbarium, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Plants collected in South Carolina.
In the summer of 2015, the Anthropology 213 Ethnobotany class at the University of South Carolina conducted phenophase research at the A.C. Moore Herbarium on campus. Phenology, defined by the National Phenology Network (NPN), refers to key seasonal changes in plants and animals from year to year. We recorded phenophase related to flowering for six herbs and shrubs that grow in South Carolina. Dr. John Nelson, director of the herbarium, helped students learn to recognize the phenophases displayed on each herbarium specimen. We spent two class periods at the herbarium, during which most students hand-recorded 50-60 specimens for their species. They entered their data into Excel spread sheets. Following instructions posted by the California Phenology Project on the NPN web page, students created scatter plots and mapped trendlines. We found the most consistent trends in when peak flowering occurs across species: peak flowering is occurring earlier in the year through time (about 1-2 days per decade). We examined the following species (range in years): Itea virginica (1938-2013), Ligustrum sinense (1957-2014), Nutallanthus canadensis (1935-1996), Prunella vulgaris (1953-2013), Solanum carolinense, and Vaccineum stamineum (1936-2011).
The Snack Project
When: Fall semester in 2013 and 2014
Who: A total so far of 67 undergraduate students in the ANTH 212 Food and Culture class at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, plus undergraduate students in the 2013 Food and Culture class at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
Who: A total so far of 67 undergraduate students in the ANTH 212 Food and Culture class at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, plus undergraduate students in the 2013 Food and Culture class at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
In Fall semester of 2013, the ANTH 212 Food and Culture class at the University of South Carolina in conjunction with the Food and Culture class at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte helped create a standardized 15-minute interview on snacking. Exempt Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was awarded. Students in the Fall 2014 semester slightly modified the interview. The interview asked for basic and background information from each subject (age, sex, self-defined ethnicity, states or countries where lived for three or more years, age at which became responsible for own food choices, and special diet). Then six questions were asked: define snack; define meal; list your five favorite snacks (and under what circumstances each is eaten, and whether each may also be part of a meal); what was your favorite snack as a child?; why purchase the snacks you buy?; and what time of day do you most frequently snack?
Each student undertook 3 verbal interviews with adults, and entered the data collected onto an online form. Twenty-seven students in my class in 2013 (plus those at UNC-Charlotte) collected a total of 204 interviews, and those 38 students solely in my class in 2014 collected 123 interviews. Each student wrote an individual, hypothesis-driven paper based on all the data collected by his/her class, with the option in 2014 of also using data from the previous year.
I presented a paper on how this assignment worked in class, as well as giving a summary of snack definitions. You can watch a video of my presentation given in the summer of 2014 at the Society for Economic Botany conference!
Each student undertook 3 verbal interviews with adults, and entered the data collected onto an online form. Twenty-seven students in my class in 2013 (plus those at UNC-Charlotte) collected a total of 204 interviews, and those 38 students solely in my class in 2014 collected 123 interviews. Each student wrote an individual, hypothesis-driven paper based on all the data collected by his/her class, with the option in 2014 of also using data from the previous year.
I presented a paper on how this assignment worked in class, as well as giving a summary of snack definitions. You can watch a video of my presentation given in the summer of 2014 at the Society for Economic Botany conference!
The Vegetable Project
When: 2002-2006, 2015, 2016, 2017
Who: So far a total of 169 undergraduate and 10 graduate students in the following classes at the University of South Carolina, Columbia: ANTH 212 Food and Culture; ANTH 213 Ethnobotany: Plants & Peoples; SCCC 280A Inquiry in Social Science; and mixed undergraduate and graduate students in ANTH 513 Anthropological Ethnobotany.
An offshoot of the Homegarden Project, I began this project after several years of drought made South Carolina homegardeners reluctant to show us their drought-stricken gardens. As always, this project has IRB approval and each student is first CITI-certified for human subject research before conducting the oral interviews. Although we mostly interview adults age 18 and older, we have collected interviews of people aged 4-90 with IRB approval. The first class wrote the standardized interview, and subsequent classes modify it. As always with projects, students wrote individual, hypothesis-driven papers based on all the data collected by their class, with the option of also including data from other classes and/or previous years. I gave papers on this project and some of the data at conferences in 2005, 2006, and 2007.
The purpose of this study is to examine what Americans understand the category of “vegetable” to mean. As a fuzzy category that is based on function and often learned by example, vegetable is not easily defined. Nevertheless, vegetable is a term used in many American situations, such as what parents tell children to eat, what the U.S.D.A. recommends people to eat, the topic of cookbooks or gardening books, and the labels on foods.
Overall, the project asks, what is a vegetable? Do Americans agree on a definition of vegetable (how salient is the term?) and do they reach consensus on the members of this domain? How do people learn what members belong to this domain? If it is by example, by 4 years old, you’ve eaten 2,920 meals in which vegetables may have been served; by age 90, you eaten nearly 65,700 meals in which vegetables may have been served!
One undergraduate senior honors thesis has been written: Vaughn, Ashley Marie. April 2004. What is a Vegetable? Function and Fuzziness in American English. Undergraduate Honors Thesis (89 p). Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC.
Who: So far a total of 169 undergraduate and 10 graduate students in the following classes at the University of South Carolina, Columbia: ANTH 212 Food and Culture; ANTH 213 Ethnobotany: Plants & Peoples; SCCC 280A Inquiry in Social Science; and mixed undergraduate and graduate students in ANTH 513 Anthropological Ethnobotany.
An offshoot of the Homegarden Project, I began this project after several years of drought made South Carolina homegardeners reluctant to show us their drought-stricken gardens. As always, this project has IRB approval and each student is first CITI-certified for human subject research before conducting the oral interviews. Although we mostly interview adults age 18 and older, we have collected interviews of people aged 4-90 with IRB approval. The first class wrote the standardized interview, and subsequent classes modify it. As always with projects, students wrote individual, hypothesis-driven papers based on all the data collected by their class, with the option of also including data from other classes and/or previous years. I gave papers on this project and some of the data at conferences in 2005, 2006, and 2007.
The purpose of this study is to examine what Americans understand the category of “vegetable” to mean. As a fuzzy category that is based on function and often learned by example, vegetable is not easily defined. Nevertheless, vegetable is a term used in many American situations, such as what parents tell children to eat, what the U.S.D.A. recommends people to eat, the topic of cookbooks or gardening books, and the labels on foods.
Overall, the project asks, what is a vegetable? Do Americans agree on a definition of vegetable (how salient is the term?) and do they reach consensus on the members of this domain? How do people learn what members belong to this domain? If it is by example, by 4 years old, you’ve eaten 2,920 meals in which vegetables may have been served; by age 90, you eaten nearly 65,700 meals in which vegetables may have been served!
One undergraduate senior honors thesis has been written: Vaughn, Ashley Marie. April 2004. What is a Vegetable? Function and Fuzziness in American English. Undergraduate Honors Thesis (89 p). Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC.
The South Carolina Homegarden Project
This is the original class project I began in 1994, in which all the students worked on the same project, rather than groups of students working on various group projects.
When: 1994, 1995, 1997-2001
Who: A total of 117 students collected 88 two-hour interviews and drew maps of yards. All students were in the ANTH 213 Ethnobotany class.
Many people use part of their yard to grow a garden for food production. The types of plants grown, the arrangement of the yard and garden, and the gardening techniques may reflect the different ethnic backgrounds of the gardeners. Whereas a large literature exists on tropical homegardens, few studies have examined temperate homegardens. As this study progressed, we also began to examine whether any of the plants in the yard hold special meaning for the gardener.
Publication:
Wagner, Gail E. 2002. Why Plants Have Meanings. In Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Ethnobiology, edited by John R. Stepp, Felice S. Wyndham, and Rebecca K. Zarger, pp. 559-667. University of Georgia Press, Athens.
When: 1994, 1995, 1997-2001
Who: A total of 117 students collected 88 two-hour interviews and drew maps of yards. All students were in the ANTH 213 Ethnobotany class.
Many people use part of their yard to grow a garden for food production. The types of plants grown, the arrangement of the yard and garden, and the gardening techniques may reflect the different ethnic backgrounds of the gardeners. Whereas a large literature exists on tropical homegardens, few studies have examined temperate homegardens. As this study progressed, we also began to examine whether any of the plants in the yard hold special meaning for the gardener.
Publication:
Wagner, Gail E. 2002. Why Plants Have Meanings. In Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Ethnobiology, edited by John R. Stepp, Felice S. Wyndham, and Rebecca K. Zarger, pp. 559-667. University of Georgia Press, Athens.
The Biocultural Diversity Project
When: 2008, 2012
Who: In 2008, students at the University of South Carolina as well as students at Clemson University. In 2012, students at
University of South Carolina, Wofford College, Clemson University, Hollins University, Emory University, and University of British Columbia collected a total of 206 interviews.
Conceived and tested in 2007-2008 with Karen Hall at Clemson University, I formed a 2012 teaching/learning community that electronically spanned the continent to connect students with other students in sharing local knowledge, providing rich material for student comparison of place-based knowledge and appreciation of biocultural diversity. In 2012, six instructors at different universities shared a student-centered, place-based standardized interview. The six of us taught different sorts of mostly undergraduate courses with different levels of students on different academic schedules. Courses were taught under different departments: Anthropology, Biology, Forestry, Human Health, and Sociology. We used Adobe FormsCentral to share data among us.
Who: In 2008, students at the University of South Carolina as well as students at Clemson University. In 2012, students at
University of South Carolina, Wofford College, Clemson University, Hollins University, Emory University, and University of British Columbia collected a total of 206 interviews.
Conceived and tested in 2007-2008 with Karen Hall at Clemson University, I formed a 2012 teaching/learning community that electronically spanned the continent to connect students with other students in sharing local knowledge, providing rich material for student comparison of place-based knowledge and appreciation of biocultural diversity. In 2012, six instructors at different universities shared a student-centered, place-based standardized interview. The six of us taught different sorts of mostly undergraduate courses with different levels of students on different academic schedules. Courses were taught under different departments: Anthropology, Biology, Forestry, Human Health, and Sociology. We used Adobe FormsCentral to share data among us.
The Botanical Knowledge Project
When: 2007, 2009, 2016, 2018
Who: Undergraduate students in ANTH 213 Ethnobotany: Plants & Peoples
Where: University of South Carolina, Columbia, campus
"A handful of studies on the botanical knowledge of people, especially children and students, hints that American botanical novices and others from industrialized nations or non-resource-dependent communities know relatively few of the plants that grow around them compared to experts or people in societies who live close to nature" (Wagner 2008:443).
Part of the Biocultural Diversity Project, undergraduate students (with IRB approval) interviewed other students about local plant knowledge. In the 2007 pilot project, 16 of my students interviewed 31 other college students aged 18-22, who were asked to restrict their answers to plants that grow in South Carolina: freelist garden flowers, grasses, local domesticated crops, and native/local trees, vines, and wildflowers/weeds. I published an open-source article (linked below) on the data they collected, and one of my students went on to conduct a similar study on elementary school students for her senior honor's thesis (article also linked below). I scored the answers from the pilot study freelists as correct, not native, or inappropriate, and ran them through ANTHROPAC to examine cultural consensus. Whereas the students could list an average of 9.0 crops, 8.4 trees, and 5.4 garden flowers correctly, they could list fewer than 2 each of vines, wildflowers/weeds, and grasses correctly.
In the subsequent semester of study, we focused on one domain in which students had done relatively well (trees) and one domain in which they had not (vines). This time we asked other students to freelist all the trees they thought they could recognize that grow in South Carolina, and to do the same with vines. Next, the students were taken on a plant trail through campus and asked to identify 20 marked trees and 10 marked vines. An attempt was made to include those plants with the greatest consensus from the pilot study on our plant trail. The interview continues to evolve with each iteration of the project!
Who: Undergraduate students in ANTH 213 Ethnobotany: Plants & Peoples
Where: University of South Carolina, Columbia, campus
"A handful of studies on the botanical knowledge of people, especially children and students, hints that American botanical novices and others from industrialized nations or non-resource-dependent communities know relatively few of the plants that grow around them compared to experts or people in societies who live close to nature" (Wagner 2008:443).
Part of the Biocultural Diversity Project, undergraduate students (with IRB approval) interviewed other students about local plant knowledge. In the 2007 pilot project, 16 of my students interviewed 31 other college students aged 18-22, who were asked to restrict their answers to plants that grow in South Carolina: freelist garden flowers, grasses, local domesticated crops, and native/local trees, vines, and wildflowers/weeds. I published an open-source article (linked below) on the data they collected, and one of my students went on to conduct a similar study on elementary school students for her senior honor's thesis (article also linked below). I scored the answers from the pilot study freelists as correct, not native, or inappropriate, and ran them through ANTHROPAC to examine cultural consensus. Whereas the students could list an average of 9.0 crops, 8.4 trees, and 5.4 garden flowers correctly, they could list fewer than 2 each of vines, wildflowers/weeds, and grasses correctly.
In the subsequent semester of study, we focused on one domain in which students had done relatively well (trees) and one domain in which they had not (vines). This time we asked other students to freelist all the trees they thought they could recognize that grow in South Carolina, and to do the same with vines. Next, the students were taken on a plant trail through campus and asked to identify 20 marked trees and 10 marked vines. An attempt was made to include those plants with the greatest consensus from the pilot study on our plant trail. The interview continues to evolve with each iteration of the project!
© Gail E. Wagner, 2014. The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author. The contents of the page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of South Carolina. Page last updated 31 January 2018.