MSA Inoculum Educator Spotlight October 2021: Dr. Brandon Matheny

MSA Inoculum Educator Spotlight October 2021: Dr. Brandon Matheny
Interviewed by Sara Gremillion of the MSA Education Committee
Dr. Matheny’s shared course materials can be found here: https://msafungi.org/course-materials/
Interview questions:
- What is your name and how long have you been teaching Mycology?
Brandon Matheny – for just over 20 years in some form or other. I started out teaching mushroom identification and workshops in microscopy and macrophotography for the Puget Sound Mycological Society. These were evening courses for adults.
- What is the title of your Mycology-focused course and what is the level of your course?
I do several and am fortunate to be able to do so at a place like the University of Tennessee (UT). The first is upper-division Field Mycology, which is a course intended for our concentration in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), but students from a wide array of departments take the course – art, psychology, biochemistry, micro, and so on. The second is another EEB upper-division course called Fungal Diversity. This has been a writing-intensive course so it gets fewer students, but it generally garners my best reviews. In it I assign mostly current papers (including ones I want to read) that cut across different modes of fungal diversity. I have also taught separate graduate-level courses in fungal systematics on one hand and fungal fossils and time-trees on the other.
- What is your favorite activity taught in this course and what is the goal of this activity?
I guess I really like taking students into the field to collect mushrooms for Field Mycology. I emphasize with them how to use all of their senses – sight, smell, taste, touch, audio (even telepathy for those who are gullible) – to help them discern different mushroom traits. Being able to do so helps them identify mushrooms more effectively. You can see this when they try to key them out.
- How is this activity assessed? In other words, how do you know if it’s effective?
See above. I see them navigating successfully through taxonomic keys.
- What advice would you give to someone who is new to teaching a Mycology-focused course or who is looking to update their previously taught Mycology-focused course?
Mycology means different things. I don’t teach a fungal biology class like I used to as a TA at the University of Washington. That was a genuine fungal biology class covering the gamut of fungal phylogenetic diversity, including lab sections; mushrooms were only a single lab! No PowerPoints, just a chalkboard or a few slides time to time and lots of hands-on work with the organisms, which was made capable by an excellent support staff, who maintained and primed cultures for action. At UT, however, I focus on what I do best – mushroom systematics and taxonomy, which we call Field Mycology. This complements our other organismal-based, muddy-boot courses. So, I’d suggest focus on what you do best and, if you do research, integrate that into your teaching.