Teaching in agricultural economics is often lecture-based and the adoption of active learning methods is often done in isolation and on an ad hoc basis. An APLU Innovative Teaching Award was used to create a teaching and learning community modeled on the principles of a team-based active learning pedagogy, POGIL (Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning). A key idea of POGIL is that students who are part of an interactive peer-learning community are more likely to be successful; and, that students enjoy themselves more and develop greater ownership over the material when they are given an opportunity to construct their own understanding. The same idea applies to a community of discipline-based educational practitioners creating and learning as a team through the construction of active learning activities. This mimics the broader, multidisciplinary success of the POGIL Project (POGIL.org)—a network of peers that breaks the isolation of teaching by creating and sharing active learning activities and practices.

In this project, the instructor-participants of the learning community were trained in POGIL methods and developed new individual POGIL activities that were used in their classes and are being deposited into the POGIL Activity Clearinghouse for others to use. In doing this, the instructor-participants not only enhanced their own teaching but also created resources for others thus increasing the impact of the project’s learning community. This was also done more quickly than if the participants operated individually rather than as a team.

Because the learning community was situated across departments and campuses of the California State University system and because it was executed primarily in a virtual Zoom environment, it provides a flexible model for increasing the creative potential for disciplinary and multidisciplinary learning communities while still working from a common team-based, active learning philosophy.