APLU’s Academic Programs Section Announces 2019 Winners of Biannual Innovative Teaching Awards

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) Board on Agriculture Assembly Academic Programs Section today named winners of its 2019 Innovative Teaching Awards. In their sixth year, the biannual awards are intended to bolster innovation in the post-secondary teaching of agriculture and related fields.

The awards program encourages new faculty to expand their scholarship of teaching and learning by creating projects with more senior faculty from their own or other institutions. Both levels of the awards, single institution and inter-institutional, encourage the adoption of innovative teaching and learning experiences for students. But the inter-institutional awards go further by encouraging institutional collaboration, expanding the impact of creative projects to more institutions and their students. Awardees share up to $5,000 per project to use on classroom aids, travel, or other project needs in the future.

“For junior faculty involved, this may be the first monetary award they receive, which, when combined with the mentoring by working with senior faculty on the project, boost their abilities as both a teacher and a researcher,” said Wendy Fink, APLU Director of Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources and Executive Director of the Academic Programs Section.

The awards serve as a basis for continued innovation in agricultural education and as motivation to seek additional funding from other sources for continued innovation.

The full list of winners follows below:

Inter-institutional Awards

Innovating Clinical Nutrition Instruction for the Pacific

Monica Esquivel, Assistant Professor of Human Nutrition, College of Tropical Agriculture & Human Resources, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and Tanisha Aflague, Assistant Professor of Nutrition, College of Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Guam

Using Experiential Learning to Help Undergraduates Understand the Science of Science Communication

Quisto Settle, Assistant professor of Agricultural Communications, Oklahoma State University and Holli Seitz, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Mississippi State University

Single Institution Awards

Community-Engaged Learning with Pennsylvania Farmworkers

Kathleen Sexsmith, Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology, Pennsylvania State University and Melanie Miller Foster, Assistant Professor of International Agriculture, Pennsylvania State University

Improving Undergraduate Education with Microbiome-based CURES at Scale

Jennifer Drew, Lecturer in Microbiology and Cell Science, University of Florida and Eric Triplett, Professor and Chair of Microbiology and Cell Science, University of Florida

Incorporating Engineering into Agricultural Engineering Education

G. W. Bates, Assistant Professor of BioResource and Agricultural Engineering, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Ann DeLay, Associate professor of Agricultural Education and Communication, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.