The Rod Nave Award

October 31, 1998

Rod attended a conference of the Southeastern Association for the Education of Teachers in Science with Dr. Ed Lucy of the College of Eduction at Georgia State University. He was surprised by being presented with this award, which they named after him!
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I had been working fairly intensively with both students and faculty in the College of Education for almost twenty years toward the goal of preparing science teachers, but this award was certainly a bolt out of the blue.

The intent was to initiate an award which they could give in an ongoing fashion to recognize contributions to developing science teachers. I'm in agreement with that and have been interested in the persons to whom the award has been presented since then.

The question is, why did they pick me to get the ball rolling?

I'm suspicious that Ed Lucy had a good bit to do with it. I had worked with him for a number of years on the dissertation committees of candidates for the doctorate in science education. I had also talked with him a good bit about the Conceptual Physics course which I initiated in 1980 and was at that time still teaching every summer. The intent of that course was to provide an intensive hands-on physics course designed to prepare science teachers. He was also aware of the HyperPhysics resource that I was developing with the hope of providing assistance to science teachers. An interesting part of that was that the HyperPhysics structure is based on concept maps, and I became aware of concept maps while serving on the Science Education Ph D Dissertation committee of Bill Pankratius who was exploring the use of concept maps in physics education. It was also coincidental that this award was made at almost the same time that I made the move of HyperPhysics to the then-relatively-new World Wide Web. It grew rapidly from that point on.

The best thing about the award was to see the Southeastern Association for the Education of Teachers in Science continue to honor teachers from around the Southeast.

Robert L. Potter

2001

Reference: USF

Ralph J. Rascati

2002

Reference: KSU

Ann Shenk

January 30, 2012

From the University of Georgia news media.

Anne Shenk, director of educational programs at the State Botanical Garden since 1985, received the Rod Nave Award from the Southeastern Association of Science Teacher Education at the group's annual meeting, hosted at UGA in October.

She was honored for her work in collaborating with science education faculty and students on grants, educational programs and the award-winning international gardening environmental curricula "Garden Earth Naturalist" and "Our Shared Forests." She was recognized for building an educational emphasis at the garden with workshops, field trips, family festivals, science nights, ecology clubs, environmental education camps and fundraising to support thousands of participants each year.

Kim Shaw, Columbus State University

October 6, 2015