Did the title of this course leave you bamboozled?
Assistant Professor of Teaching, Janine Wang is one of the people who teaches WSE 392 – Bamboolooza: The Fascinating World of Bamboo.
She says that when she first heard about the job opening for the position she holds now, it was very specific to her interests and skills, “and one thing led to another and I moved across the country.”
“I’m originally from New York and Philadelphia, and I’m a wood turner and teaching artist by profession.” Her time at OSU has been short, only just over a year, but she is really liking it here, saying that, “people are nerdy in the best way.”
“I can’t take credit for the content of the course. That is all a guy in our department named Arijit Sinha. He has done some amazing research into a lot of different topics, and for a while he was going hard on bamboo, which is really exciting.”
The other people who teach this class besides Wang, she believes, are Seema Mangla, who is in the College of Forestry, and there is also a PhD student, Razia Sultana Popy, who teaches it.
Wang doesn’t teach just this class, WSE 392, but she also teaches the wood turning introduction class, the intro to furniture class (called wood product studio), but she says she has a bias towards it, “heavily on the architecture,” since she finds it so interesting.
She goes on to explain that, “the art and design concentration within the wood science and engineering school uses the arts and design to teach wood science, and like, you know, have hands-on experience, and like offer different modality and learning a pretty specific thing about material.”
“We call ourselves a wood science and engineering department, but in reality, it’s like there’s a lot of adjacent sciences next to them”
She also talks about the department, how, “when it comes to like sustainable materials in you know, woody plants and materials, there’s like bamboo comes into play, hemp comes into play. There’s a lot of buzz right now about biofuels.”
Wang recommends that students who may be interested in the class should, “sign up early,” since the course WSE 392 is popular.
“In terms of what the course has to offer, I think people seem to understand inherently why it’s exciting.”
She says, “the course actually goes into all sorts of different directions that each unravel, like, something fundamental about, say, like, there’s biology involved, there’s like some parts of botany, like there’s, you know, what’s the anatomy of bamboo?”
She goes on to talk about how the course dives into how bamboo is used structurally or in culture/social context, “who creates the most bamboo or cultivates it the most? What does it take to cultivate the happy stand of bamboo? What’s its like, growth habit, etc.”
She mentions that there is some hands-on work in the class but in terms of assignments, “there are a couple of pretty well researched papers in there too.”
One assignment she mentions that students will have to do for this class is where students look for new technologies companies use with their bamboo as a product. She says how bamboo is a versatile material and that for example, “I’m familiar with it from Asian countries as like a scaffolding material, instead of building like a steel thing to build things … they can build skyscrapers with bamboo.”
She talks about how in India she actually saw how they’ll use long sticks of bamboo indoors, propped up vertically, “so that it’s like, wedged between the floor and the ceiling, and then you’ll do a whole forest of that in a room,” and in some cases, they can then cast an additional floor on top, “because it’s held by like a literal forest of bamboo on the inside.”
Wang says that bamboo has a lot of uses besides construction, “basket weaving is a huge one. It’s got a really long history and culture in China and people still do it.”
She says, “it just bridges so many different disciplines and gets super specific in each one, in a way that helps you understand how to contextualize the material [bamboo] in the world.”
