APLU’s Academic Programs Section Announces 2020 Winners of Biannual Innovative Teaching Awards

APLU’s Board on Agriculture Assembly Academic Programs Section today named winners of its 2020 Innovative Teaching Awards. In their seventh 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 aid, 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 Executive Director of the Academic Programs Section and Director of Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources.

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

Exploring a Digital Mind Space: Using Apple Technology to Foster Students’ Creative Processes

Ryan Hargrove, Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment, University of Kentucky

Richard Alomar, Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, Scholl of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University

Single Institution Awards

Effectiveness of Group Work Between Students in Landscape Contracting Programs across the US: Using Immersive Learning Technologies to Increase Student’s Awareness of Regional Issues and Student Creativity

Margaret Hoffman, Assistant Professor of Landscape Contracting, Department of Plant Sciences, College of Agricultural Sciences, Pennsylvania State University

Shaping knowledge: 3D modeling to foster learning of complex subjects

Kevin Begcy, Assistant Professor, and Bart Schutzman, Lecturer, Environmental Horticulture Department, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Florida