Dr. Erin McKenney receives the 2022 Libraries Faculty Award

The 2022 NC State University Libraries Faculty Award has been given to Erin McKenney, Assistant Professor in Applied Ecology and Director of Undergraduate Programs.

The Libraries Faculty Award is given to an NC State faculty member who has contributed consistently and notably to the accomplishment of the Libraries' mission, vision, and strategic initiatives. The award, established in commemoration of the Libraries’ centennial year in 1989, enables the Libraries to recognize faculty contributions.

McKenney has worked with the Libraries in adopting open educational resources (OERs) and pedagogy, exemplifying their use and benefits through both her instruction and her citizen science endeavors such as the Global Sourdough Project. While some faculty members have used OERs merely for the cost savings they present to students, McKenney has embraced open education more broadly through all aspects of her teaching and research to promote open and publicly engaged scholarship. It’s a vision that the Libraries shares.

“Public engagement is the core of the Global Sourdough Project—from data collection to publication,” writes Hannah Rainey, Libraries Associate Head of Research Engagement, in her nomination of McKenney. "She was an inaugural speaker for the popular Fermentology mini-seminars, which engaged food and science enthusiasts across the globe during the early days of the pandemic. She takes effort to visualize and communicate complex microbial systems, rendering them accessible and exciting for home bakers and undergraduates alike."

“In its best implementation, citizen science involves the development of materials that are freely and openly available to the public, who can then engage in the co-creation of data and of  knowledge,” McKenney told the Libraries for an article in 2019.

This wider vision led McKenney to participate in the Libraries’ first Open Pedagogy Incubator, a semester-long program that helps faculty go beyond the first step in open education—the simple adoption of open course materials—to implement multiple, open-enabled practices in their courses. Initially drawn to open pedagogy because her students were struggling with textbook costs, McKenney saw that the Libraries’ incubator and other open education programs could help develop other core values such as sharing information, lowering barriers to education, and engaging more learners.

“The framework of open pedagogy aligns with a number of things that I had been doing before by instinct, things that felt right and good,” McKenney says. “So it’s been great to learn that there is a body of research out there that substantiates things that I do intuitively.”

McKenney has also presented in the Libraries’ Coffee & Viz series twice, in February 2020 when she discussed goals and strategies associated with designing effective data visualizations for publication versus public education, and again in March 2020 when she shared specific examples of the iterative data visualization process from her own research and in the classroom.