Teaching and Learning

Education. A large portion of this issue is dedicated to inves-tigations that explore how students think about plants and how faculty teach about plants. To date, people with an in-terest in studying plant science teaching and learning have limited journals for publishing their scholarly work. The call for contributions to this section was intended to attract au-thors and readers with an interest in plant science education. During the peer review process, one criterion for selection of papers required that the work provided insight into student learning focused specifically on plants. So, if plants were used as a possible example rather than as a focal point of learning, the paper was not considered appropriate for this section. Some very good instruction makes use of plants as examples, but we wanted to highlight learning challenges and oppor-tunities unique to teaching and learning about plants. Plants have long inspired influential individuals (e.g., Robert Hooke, Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Barbara McClintock) whose contributions to science extend far beyond their botanical training. Today, one tiny mustard, Arabidopsis thaliana, has taken the world by storm. Uniting researchers across the globe, Arabidopsis transcends a model and has become the reference organism addressing major questions in plant biology in less than a quarter century. It has ushered in an explosion of molecular data as the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced; and it has served as the cornerstone for biotechnological applications with plants. Furthermore, Arabidopsis has been used in classrooms to im