APLU’s Academic Programs Section Announces 2025 Spring Winners of Innovative Teaching Awardees

APLU’s Board on Agriculture Assembly’s Academic Programs Section (APS) named winners of its 2025 Spring Innovative Teaching Awards. In their eleventh year, the biannual awards are intended to bolster innovation in the post-secondary teaching of agriculture and related fields. Awardees share up to $5,000 per project, plus $1,000 in matching funds. The awards program encourages:  

• New faculty to expand their scholarship of teaching and learning by creating projects with more senior faculty from their own and other institutions. 
• Adoption of innovative teaching and learning experiences for students. 
• Institutional collaboration that expands the impact of creative projects to more institutions and students. 
• Motivation to seek additional funding for the scholarship of teaching and learning from additional sources. 

“This may be the junior faculty’s first monetary award 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, Executive Director of APS. The 2025 Spring winners are: 

Enhancing Experiential Learning via Artificial Intelligence-assisted Citizen Science
Dr. Zhiyong Cheng of the University of Florida and Dr. Miriam Garcia of Alabama A&M University

Rolling the Dice on Gamification in Undergraduate One Health Instruction: Where Decision-Making and Collaboration Solve Wicked Problems
Dr. Jennifer Koehl and Dr. Jody Kull of the Pennsylvania State University

Creating VR Plant Identification Walks to Enhance Course Pedagogy
Dr. Chad Miller and Ms. Makenzie K. Lee of Colorado State University

From Roots to Resilience: Integrating Indigenous Practices in Sustainability Education
Dr. Qing Lou of Oklahoma State University