2022 Apgar Award Announced

DCAL is delighted to announce the winner of the 2022 Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching. This year's award goes to professors Maron Greenleaf and Sarah Kelly for their course Environmental Justice (ANTH 12.26/GEOG 39.01). Professor Greenleaf is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Kelly is a Post-doctoral researcher affiliated with the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society and the Department of Anthropology.

The Apgar Award recognizes and supports innovative teaching initiatives that cross traditional academic boundaries. The award is aimed at team-taught, interdisciplinary courses, particularly those offered by faculty at an early stage of their careers and particularly faculty in the Arts and Humanities. A gift from Mahlon Apgar, IV D'62 and Sarah Tipper Apgar, Tu'11 made this award possible. The endowment for this prize provides a modest cash prize to each of the faculty teaching the course selected for the award.

Environmental Justice draws on methodologies from Anthropology, Sociolegal Studies, and Human Geography to explore how environmental harms are experienced across different communities. The course explores the concept of "environmental justice" as it has developed through social movements in the United States and elsewhere to examine how inequality and inequity manifest themselves environmentally.

Course learning objectives include:

• Learn the history of environmental injustice and the struggle against it in different parts of the world and over time;
• Understand how and why 'the environment' is a space where inequality occurs and justice is struggled for;
• Think critically about mainstream environmentalism and environmental policy in the United States and elsewhere;
• Read and write ethnographic and other qualitative scholarship; and
• Build critical reading, writing, participation, and independent research skills.

Greenleaf and Kelly's Environmental Justice course was also the recipient of a Design Course Development Grant in 2022. The grant, part of the Design Initiative at Dartmouth, enabled the creation of a new design-based experience in the course's Energy Justice Clinic. 

The Apgar Award at Dartmouth is the latest in the Awards for Excellence program that was begun by Sandy and Anne Apgar in 1982 and is presented annually at 15 leading educational and cultural institutions and professional organizations.