PULLMAN, Wash. — Carol M. Anelli, associate professor of entomology in the Washington State University College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences, will receive the Entomological Society of America’s Distinguished Achievement Award in Teaching at the organization’s annual meeting in December.
WSU recently received notification of the award.
With 5,700 members, ESA is the largest organization in the world serving the professional and scientific needs of entomologists and people in related disciplines.
The teaching award is presented annually to the ESA member deemed to be the most outstanding teacher of the year and brings with it a monetary award. Persons nominated for the honor must have “excelled through innovations in developing new courses, programs, and teaching methods” and are evaluated in the categories of classroom instruction, other teaching aspects and outreach and activities.
Anelli, also a long-time Honors College faculty, administrator and thesis advisor at WSU, was nominated for the national award by ESA’s Pacific branch, which is made up of 11 U.S. Western states, 7 U.S. territories, 5 Canadian provinces, and 4 Mexican states. She received the ESA Pacific regional top teaching award in March.
“I am incredibly honored to receive this award, and it’s all the more meaningful because many excellent instructors have won it in the past and also because a committee of peers in my discipline selected me,” says Anelli.
Anelli was the guest speaker for the Convocation main address to incoming freshmen in August, and also spoke to new faculty at their orientation sessions with tips on modern teaching philosophies. Her own is that “first and foremost, I plan my teaching in terms of what I want my students to be prepared to do in five to 10 years from now. More than asking undergraduates to remember facts about the particular subject, I want to give them tools and experiences in the classroom to teach them to think critically, communicate well, and take an active role in their own education. The details about the subject provide the topics for that kind of learning, and my students seem to respond very well to it.”
Anelli, an associate professor of entomology, received WSU’s prestigious Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award in the category of instruction in spring of this year, and was the first chair of the university’s Teaching Academy whose members are esteemed educators appointed to the group to inspire others to great teaching. She came to WSU in 1996, joined the tenure track in entomology and began to teach in Honors in 1998, received tenure in 2004, and became an Honors Faculty Fellow in 2007. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Southern Connecticut State University, and her master’s and doctoral degrees in entomology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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