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College of Engineering professor receives Exceptional Service Award

Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning Associate Professor Lisa Giacumo received the Exceptional Service Award from the Association of Educational Communication and Technology’s Culture, Technology and Learning division at its November 2021 conference.

This award recognizes an individual nominated by peers across the nation for outstanding leadership and service in the association’s culture, learning and technology division for at least three years. Giacumo currently serves as the vice president of professional development on the Culture, Learning and Technology board.

“This was unexpected for me, but I am so honored to +be the recipient of this award,” Giacumo said. “This division works on facilitating social change and our approaches to becoming more inclusive and equitable in organizational training and education, and my students and I have put in a lot of work learning and better understanding how organizations can do this.”

Yonnie Chyung, a professor and department chair of organizational performance and workplace learning at Boise State University described Giacumo as a “talented scholar and great teacher whose professional experience and passion provide invaluable experience to students.”

Giacumo’s dedication to the culture, technology, and learning division of the Association of Education Communication and Technology has involved conducting needs assessments, facilitating webinars, making presentations and serving on the equity and social justice task force. She has been an active member in the division for about six years, first becoming involved during her doctoral studies at Arizona State University.

At the November conference, Giacumo and her team of students presented two research presentations involving the Stellar Engineering Students program grant from the College of Engineering and Giacumo’s research in organizational justice theory. Giacumo’s research explores ways organizations reach their strategic goals while ensuring that it is equitable and inclusive.

Giacumo joined the College of Engineering in 2015 after working internationally as an instructional designer, trainer and manager for businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.

At Boise State, Giacumo leads the Marginalized and Cross-Cultural Research and Design Learning Tech Group Lab where Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning students learn hands-on approaches to needs assessment, e-Learning development and content design, and mentoring systems to better understand how empathetic design-based thinking can improve learning and development initiatives in global organizations working across cultures.

“Students have the opportunity to gain more experience they typically wouldn’t get in the scope of a course,” Giacumo said. “Enriching students with leadership roles and experiences has helped set our students up for success in their careers once they graduate.”

Three of Giacumo’s students, Justin Beaudry, Madeleine MacDonald and Lorraine Frazier-Aich, also won Association of Education Communication and Technology awards at the November conference for their work with the Idaho Food Bank.

The Association for Education Communications and Technology is a professional association of instructional designers, educators and professionals who provide leadership and advise policy makers to sustain a continuous effort to enrich teaching and learning.

For more information about the Marginalized and Cross-Cultural Research and Design Learning Tech Group Lab or the Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning department visit Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning.

-By Jamie Fink

AECT Conference 2021
Lisa Giacumo (far right) and students Kendra Peterson and Madeleine MacDonald, present research at the November 2021 AECT conference.