APLU’s Academic Programs Section Announces 2021 Winners of Biannual Innovative Teaching Awards

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities’ (APLU) Board on Agriculture Assembly’s Academic Programs Section today named winners of its 2021 Spring Innovative Teaching Awards. In their eighth 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. The awards encourage the adoption of innovative teaching and learning experiences for students and encourage institutional collaboration, expanding the impact of creative projects to more institutions and their students. Awardees share up to $5,000 per project, plus $2,000 in matching funds, 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 – will boost their abilities as both a teacher and a researcher,” said Wendy Fink, APLU Assistant Vice President 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:

• Joshua Craver, Colorado State University and Chad Miller, Kansas State University, Developing Immersive Horticulture Industry Experiences Using Virtual Reality Applications.
• Zhiyong Cheng, University of Florida and Omolola Betiku, Florida A&M University, Gain in Research Ability Test (GRAT) for a Twofold Backward Design of Lab Courses.
• Michael Mashtare, The Pennsylvania State University and Laura Bowling, Purdue University, ICE: Interinstitutional Capstone Experiences in Environmental Sciences.