Three University of Georgia faculty members have been named recipients of the Richard B. Russell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the university’s highest early career teaching honor.
The 2025 Russell Award winners are:
- Harrison P. Frye, associate professor of political science in the School of Public and International Affairs;
- Glenna L. Read, associate professor of advertising in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication; and
- Alexander T. Strauss, assistant professor of ecology in the Odum School of Ecology.
“This year’s recipients of the Richard B. Russell Awards have demonstrated a passion for advancing excellence in undergraduate instruction at the University of Georgia,” said S. Jack Hu, the university’s senior vice president for academic affairs and provost. “Their use of innovative teaching approaches, and their embrace of active learning principles create a rigorous, engaging and valuable classroom experience for their students.”
Harrison P. Frye
As a political theorist, Frye’s classes focus on controversial questions related to politics and society. While navigating such topics can be perilous, Frye fosters an open classroom environment that facilitates robust but reasoned debate. He often assigns students to defend views that they do not personally hold.
“Too often students think arguing is about affirming a position,” said Frye. “Instead, the most cogent arguments are those that take seriously why they might be wrong and then rebut such concerns.”
To help students master material that is subject to profound disagreement, Frye focuses on three basic goals.
First, he wants students to understand the complexity of difficult issues. Second, he aims to help students understand viewpoints they disagree with. Lastly, he expects students to learn to write strong, clear papers that explain and convincingly defend positions related to the fundamental questions of politics.
In each of his courses, Frye limits his lectures and uses a Socratic approach, pushing and prodding students to expand on or rephrase their thoughts. Regular writing assignments — and chances to rewrite and revise papers in response to Frye’s comments — give students an opportunity to think more clearly about their beliefs and their reasons for those beliefs.
Frye’s approach to writing assignments has shifted his students’ focus from earning a particular grade to mastering the material. He hopes this change makes a lasting impression and helps students retain lessons about critical thinking and consider competing viewpoints outside the classroom.
Glenna L. Read
Read teaches a core advertising class that is challenging for students and instructors alike. The course on media strategy and activation emphasizes strategic thinking and mathematical concepts as students work through the process of creating a media plan.
To engage students and achieve the rigorous course objectives, Read has incorporated a variety of innovative teaching practices. Based on feedback from students, Read gamified the course’s section on ratings math, so students compete to solve problems using key formulas. She redevelops the course each semester and incorporates additional active learning approaches to engage students in critical thinking. Read also emphasizes how the course content aligns with her students’ career goals.
Read’s research focuses on the use of biometric tools in advertising, which help companies understand how consumers react to their ads. She incorporates discussion of these tools in her courses and exposes students to an evolving technology before they enter the job market.
“My teaching philosophy means that my work is never done,” she said. “I will constantly strive to innovate and work to improve the educational outcomes for undergraduate students.”
Alexander T. Strauss
Strauss’ teaching goals are to engage his students’ curiosity, hone their critical thinking and foster their scientific literacy.
Since joining UGA in 2020, Strauss has redesigned and taught three of the four core classes in the Odom School of Ecology multiple times. By incorporating hands-on fieldwork, collaborative projects and practical applications of ecological theory, Strauss ensures students receive a well-rounded education that prepares them for real-world challenges in their future careers.
Strauss has systematically redesigned his flagship course, population and community ccology, with innovations such as think-pair-shares, structured discussions of articles from the primary literature and scaffolded problem sets where students analyze ecological data in R, a programming language for statistical computing and data visualization. He also devotes a substantial portion of class to activities and assignments that target math fear. He breaks up lectures with activities that require students to derive equations and sketch relationships on individual white boards. Students perform mathematical calculations, sketch graphs and seek ecological patterns in real data. Group research projects are another major component of the class.
Recognizing that students come from a variety of backgrounds and are heading for a wide range of careers, Strauss strives to teach in a way that connects with as many students as possible.
“I believe that that the only way to address the world’s global environmental challenges is to tackle them together, directly or indirectly, from a variety of perspectives,” Strauss said.
Nominations for the Russell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching are submitted by deans and considered by a committee of senior faculty members and undergraduate students. Tenure-track faculty members who have worked at UGA for at least three years and no more than 10 years are eligible for the award. The awards are supported by the Richard B. Russell Foundation in Atlanta, and each recipient receives $10,000 one-time monetary award.
To learn more about the Russell Awards and see a list of past winners, see https://provost.uga.edu/academic-excellence/honors-awards/teaching-awards-professorships/richard-russell-awards-for-excellence-in-undergraduate-teaching/.