If you asked Brian Sebade to name all the plants growing in your field, pasture, or backyard, he could do it. If pressed, he’d probably nonchalantly rattle off their scientific names as well.
After more than a decade working as a county educator for UW Extension, Sebade brought his passion for plants back into the college classroom. Since fall 2023, he has served as assistant lecturer in the UW Department of Ecosystem Science and Management (ESM). In addition to teaching “Principles of Rangeland Management,” a foundational class for students majoring in rangeland ecology and watershed management, Sebade also leads plant identification classes and labs.
Already, students and colleagues have recognized not only his encyclopedic knowledge of rangeland plants, but also his warmth, good humor, and genuine care for those around him.
“Mr. Sebade created a classroom environment of comfort and lightheartedness in one of the more rigorous ‘weed-out’ classes in the rangeland program,” writes a student who nominated Sebade for UW’s 2024 Promoting Intellectual Engagement (PIE) awards. “He was always willing to drop what he was working on and help us out if we asked, which we did, a lot. He also modeled a passion for plants that made us laugh, but inspired us to want [to] work harder, too.”
Sebade was once a student in the same department, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in rangeland ecology and watershed management before joining UW Extension in 2011. His extensive on-the-ground experience and practical knowledge is a strength in the classroom, students and colleagues agree.
Students note that the examples Sebade shared from his extension experience helped anchor their learning, connecting the classroom to the real world.
“Brian doesn’t just know the plants, he knows the systems and understands the local perspectives of people in the state,” says Tim Collier, head of the ESM department. “He knows the problems people face in terms of rangeland management in Wyoming, and he imparts that to students.”
UW’s PIE awards honor instructors who inspire excitement, inquiry, and autonomy in classes for first-year students. According to his pupils, Sebade does just that, structuring classes so that “no student could walk away without learning how to learn on their own.”
Throughout the courses he teaches, Sebade encourages peer-to-peer learning and mentorship. In a class that required memorizing 20 plants each week, for example, he facilitated tabletop discussions so that students could share their most successful study methods with one another.
Rather than simply lecture, Sebade actively engages students, drawing on what they already know and inviting them to join the conversation, Collier notes. Even in large introductory classes, “he often asks them questions and gets them to fill in the blanks, using their own knowledge.”
Whether it’s outdoors, in a lecture hall, or hunched over plant samples in the rangeland ecology herbarium, one thing is clear: Sebade is an outstanding educator.
This article was originally published in the 2024 issue of Roots & Ranges, an annual magazine published by the UW College of Agriculture, Life Sciences and Natural Resources.
