A gem of an instructor: NIC music prof wins state award

North Idaho College’s Dwayne Huff has been named a 2022 Idaho GEM Innovative Educator by the Idaho State Board of Education.

Huff, an NIC assistant professor of music, is one of six educators from throughout the state to receive the award. The award winners will be recognized at the State General Education Summit on Wednesday, Oct. 5 in Boise.

The prestigious awards recognize outstanding teaching in one of Idaho’s General Education Matriculation (GEM) courses. Huff received the award in Humanistic and Artistic Ways of Knowing.

Huff has been a music instructor at NIC since 2015. He has served as a member of the State Board of Education’s Artistic and Humanistic Ways of Knowing sub-committee and as a member of NIC’s Student Learning Outcomes Assessment committee.

The annual Idaho GEM Innovative Educator awards program formally recognizes the work of educators who engage students with innovative teaching practices and support student achievement of general education learning outcomes.

Nominees must demonstrate helping non-majors understand and apply disciplinary methods of inquiry, faculty mentoring and an active record of increasing educational access and affordability for students.

Huff was nominated for the awards program by NIC Director of Choirs Max Mendez, who said Huff has been at the forefront of affordable educational access since arriving at NIC. Huff has developed courses based on free instructional materials called open educational resource instead of requiring students to buy textbooks.

“The national and international trend toward OER-based instruction has been a priority for Dr. Huff for many years,” Mendez said. “In the summer of 2020, on his own time, he developed an asynchronous online Introduction to Music course utilizing OER materials that be offered as an Online Idaho course moving forward. This has been an important development in supporting the college’s goal of developing an associate degree curriculum utilizing all OER resources.”

Huff has also started developing another OER curriculum for the music theory courses at NIC.

For more information, contact NIC Dean of Instruction, General Studies Sherry Simkins, at 208-769-3418 or sherry.simkins@nic.edu.