Dr. Karen Barton, professor in the Department of Geography, GIS, & Sustainability at the University of Northern Colorado, is this year’s recipient of the the Harm de Blij Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Geography Teaching. The selection committee felt that all applicants were outstanding, however, Dr. Barton’s unparalleled commitment to international field education stood out as exemplary. She has led field courses to Nepal, Iceland, Guyana, Nicaragua, Peru, Kenya, and Norway in addition to points within the United States. She includes service learning in her field excursions that help students understand their place in the world, and most impressively, Dr. Barton has assembled funds for these courses from a broad range of sources, allowing a diverse group of students to participate in these impactful trips. Dr. Barton has been recognized with four awards for her teaching excellence on campus. Her peer recommendations indicate a sustained commitment to undergraduate education and experiential learning over her career as a geographer.

Gabriela Hamerlinck (Gaby), an instructional faculty at the University of Florida, is an exceptional geography teacher. Her innovative and rigorous courses focus her students on applied activities and real-world examples such as designing a global pandemic response plan, critiquing how disease is portrayed in popular culture, or creating a zombie movie! She requires students to write, provides detailed feedback, and promotes constructive peer review between students.

Hamerlinck incorporates participatory approaches to teach culturally diverse topics. Examples of her creativity include low technology ‘nanobugs’ as an example ‘game’ on how diseases spread; and social media ‘campaigns’ for effective educational programs. She created multiple new courses, including a required UF Quest course “The Next Pandemic” which she was teaching when COVID hit. Gaby also developed Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) for Geography. This CURE platform increases undergraduate research in the geography department and serves as a pedagogical tool shown to increase learning gains and retention for all students, especially those who have been historically excluded from higher education.

Hamerlinck is also a highly trained PhD in mathematical biology and offers her students a fresh perspective on those tools in geography. In each semester she teaches, more students find geography, and many pursue the discipline as a major. Hamerlinck has also taken several of her courses through the University of Florida’s rigorous processes for confirming access for all.

Andrew Jolly-Ballantine is a highly innovative teacher who developed the University of Connecticut’s Sustainable Community Food Systems program and minor, helped faculty understand and better address the range of disabilities students may face in their studies, and developed a long-standing undergraduate service-learning partnership.

Heather Bedi, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Dickinson College, shows great passion for teaching and uses a dynamic approach in creating fresh ways for students to engage with course material in the classroom and opportunities for them to actively contribute to the local community. Her teaching and community outreach are well-informed by her research into relationships between civil society, socio-environmental movements, and natural resource and landscape modifications. She is already making a strong mark on the discipline and is poised to impact geography even more into the future.

Jennifer Collins, a Professor of Geosciences at the University of South Florida, is described by her colleagues as a highly respected role model (especially for female students in STEM) and passionate about undergraduate education. Dr. Collins designs her courses to offer high impact learning experiences to her students. She has co-published with numerous undergraduate students, and routinely includes undergraduate mentoring and collaboration in her research grants. However, her impact goes far beyond her own students. Dr. Collins engages in numerous well-recognized community outreach projects herself, such as providing workshops for K-12 teachers and promoting geography in the media. One colleague described her as “… not only [having] impacted the field, students, and the community at large, but [she] is also a good steward of the environment, imparting those values onto others.” Similarly, another colleague describes her as a “true collaborator” with a strong “devotion to the university, our students, and her profession at large”. For all these reasons, we are pleased to recognize Dr. Jennifer Collins with the 2020 AAG Harm de Blij Award.

Alex Papadopoulos, Professor of Geography at DePaul University, teaches a variety of undergraduate courses including Earth’s Cultural Landscape, Urban Geography, Geopolitics and Topics in Architecture and Urbanism. His teaching accomplishments include initiating DePaul’s first experiential learning geography class, leading multiple study abroad experiences in Europe and North Africa, and mentoring numerous colleagues in their teaching. He has already been recognized with DePaul’s Excellence in Teaching award and the Cortelyou-Lowery Award for Teaching, Service and Excellence. Students describe him as an instructor who is knowledgeable, inclusive, and caring. Multiple students stated that Dr. Papadopoulos helped spark their academic interests, which resulted in life-long learning for alumni. Dr. Papadopoulos is recognized as an extraordinary, and extraordinarily committed, teacher, who values teaching above all other academic responsibilities.

Fenda Akiwumi, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of South Florida has already been recognized with an Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award from USF and a  Higher Education Teaching Award from the National Council for Geographic Education. Dr. Akiwumi, who has taken students to Ghana and Guyana, also teaches at USF’s Honors College, where she has directed a number of undergraduate theses. The Assistant Dean of the Honors College notes that Dr. Akiwumi is, “…the rare faculty member who views teaching, service, and research not as discrete categories, but as threads woven into a larger vocation.” Students have described Akiwumi as passionate, inspiring and relatable. One former student writes, “Professors like her open the door to knowledge and not simply information. I could not think of an educator more worthy of this award.”

Ronald (Ron) Kalafsky, of the University of Tennessee, has established himself as an exceptionally effective teacher of geography. He has the distinction of being one of the most popular and effective instructors within the Department of Geography. His students praise his energy, enthusiasm and interactivity, as well as inquiry- and case-study based methodologies. Kalafsky regularly challenges his students to apply spatial reasoning to their daily lives, and emphasizes the important role of geography for understanding and addressing the contemporary issues and environmental challenges of the 21st century.

Donald J. Zeigler has taught geography to undergraduate students at Old Dominion University, Virginia Beach, Virginia, for the past 36 years. During that period, he has taught nearly 200 sections of geography courses representing more than 25 geographical topics. He attended to the ever changing student population and course dynamics by using a variety of pedagogical methods, beginning initially with chalk and talk in 1980 and employing video streaming and virtual reality in 2016. His teaching repertoire includes standard lecture classes (serving small to very large course sections), field-based and study abroad courses, problem based learning, and web-based and televised distance learning courses. Zeigler’s commitment to excellence in teaching has led him to design and teach courses fulfilling key university missions, including writing intensive and service learning courses, each with a geographical perspective.