On a sunny May day, 10 New Haven public school teachers, part of a Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute seminar, were on a tour of a greenhouse at Marsh Botanical Garden, led by David Heiser, the garden's associate director of student and public engagement. After a short introduction in a room full of pitcher plants - "It looks like water, but it's not just water: it has enzymes in it that help digest insects, they're all carnivorous," he said - he invited them to explore.
"Go ahead," he told a teacher who asked if she could touch the plants. "At your own risk!"
"They are carnivorous," another teacher warned teasingly.
"Just don't touch anything furry that's not a mammal, that's what I tell my students when I take them in the forest," said Liza Comita, the Davis-Denkmann Professor of Tropical Forest Ecology at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) and the seminar leader. "But don't touch the furry mammals either."
The group was touring the gardens as part of Comita's seminar, "Tropical Forests: Ecology and Conservation." It is the first seminar Comita has taught as part of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, an initiative that brings New Haven public school teachers to campus to learn from Yale faculty in focused seminars, and to develop a curriculum unit for their students based on the topic.
