Ethnobotany MSc students

Placement students from the Textile Conservation Centre

I enjoy teaching, particularly to small groups and with plenty of plant material (dead and alive) to pass round. At Kew the focus is on postgraduate (or specialist undergraduate) and professional training and that's mainly what I do. From time to time I've helped develop resources for schools, but with 70,000 school kids visiting each year there's less opportunity to teach directly.

I work with Kew's Science Directorate to co-ordinate the long running (1998-) MSc in Ethnobotany that we run with the University of Kent. In their 8 days at Kew the students pack in quite a bit of botany (including a really thorough introduction to plant collecting) and ethnobotany, and get a good understanding of what a botanical garden is about. Students have access to Kew throughout the year (like most British Masters this is a 12 month programme). These are exceptionally committed people, with rich life experiences, and it is very satisfying seeing so many go on to build careers in (or using) ethnobotany. I'm always happy to meet or correspond with potential students.

There are two other Masters degrees with a similarly close relationship to Kew, on which I do some teaching: the Imperial College/Kew/ZSL MSc in Conservation Science and the brand new MSc Plant and Fungal Taxonomy, Diversity and Conservation, starting in 2015 and taught with Queen Mary, University of London. Students on this course will be based at Kew and get a unique immersion in the institution.

The Economic Botany Collection has close links with eight Masters courses, mostly in London. For these we usually provide half a day of teaching in the Collection, and then work with several students on placements and dissertations. These partnerships have proved very fruitful in generating new ideas and research projects, as  well as helping many students into their chosen careers.

• MA Conservation - Camberwell College of Arts
  
• MA Textile Conservation - University of Glasgow
  
• MA History of Design - Royal College of Art
  
• MA Cultural Geography - Royal Holloway, University of London
  
• MSc Environmental Archaeology - Institute of Archaeology, UCL
  
• MA Materials Anthropology Design - Anthropology, UCL
  
• MSc in Conservation for Archaeology and Museums - Institute of Archaeology, UCL
  
• MA Museum Studies - Institute of Archaeology, UCL
  

I have supervised several PhD students and have one at present, Emily Brennan, working on barkcloth with UCL Anthropology. I'm keen to increase the number - there is no shortage of good research topics in diverse fields.

Kew is a great venue for professional workshops, and I have been involved in organising and teaching these on diverse subjects ranging from basket conservation to, most recently, a two-day (too short!) course on curation of ethnobotanical collections, sponsored by the EU-funded SYNTHESYS project.