In this session, I will discuss the ways that I brought Ethnobotany into the middle school classroom. Through an immersion course, which is very simple to implement in any middle school science classroom, I intertwined culturally significant plants with bacterial research. In this session, we will discuss how we took traditionally sacred plants (sagebrush & yarrow) and tested them against bacterial growth. Students were able to participate in data collection to support traditional medicinal plant uses. In this session, I will discuss how this course can be implemented in any classroom setting. The plants used for this course had cultural significance to the Northern Cheyenne and Crow tribes, but can be adapted to any tribe in Montana. Main takeaways- allows students to connect culturally to their ancestors, easy implementation of ethnobotany, and meets IEFA standards.
