Yao Wang, Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Innovative C-I Teacher Award recipients
April 20, 2026
– Credit: College of Art & Design
For Dr. Yao Wang, a landscape architecture student's education isn't complete until they've stood at a farmers market booth, maps spread across a folding table, explaining flood dynamics to a stranger who has never heard the word "hydrology." That moment—equal parts nerve-wracking and clarifying—is exactly what Yao designs her courses to produce.
Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture in LSU's College of Art + Design. In just five semesters, she has taught fifteen Communication-Intensive courses across undergraduate and graduate levels, earning her the 2026 Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Innovative C-I Teacher Award.
Landscape architecture asks students to design the spaces between buildings—parks, shorelines, floodplains, neighborhoods—in ways that account for water, ecology, and community all at once. That kind of work, Yao argues, demands communication that goes far beyond a polished final presentation. In her courses, communication is embedded as a method of inquiry and revision from the very first week.
She puts that philosophy into practice through two signature approaches. In studios like LA 7031 Water Systems Studio and LA 7041 Urban Systems Studio, students engage in visual and technological communication through structured co-production cycles that bring them directly into the communities they're designing for. At the Crescent City Farmers Market in New Orleans, they use tools like the Neighborhood Memory Map and structured feedback boards to draw out community knowledge in real time, then return to the studio to document how that input reshaped their design decisions. In St. James Parish, students wait until residents have sketched their own visions of future home environments on base maps before generating a single design proposal themselves.
In LA 2101 Landscape Representation III, a sophomore-level course, Yao introduces an AI-assisted concept-to-prototype workflow. Students move from hand-drawn sketches through AI-assisted ideation to physical prototypes produced on a 3D printer, documenting at each stage where generated outputs fell short of ecological standards and why human judgment intervened. The workflow, she explains, trains students to become communicators who can move between scientific discourse, public dialogue, and digital tools without losing rigor.
The results have traveled well beyond the studio. Students from LA 3001 Landscape Design III received the ASLA Georgia Student Honor Award in 2025. Graduate students have presented work at national conferences, including the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting.
"I learned to read landscapes as layered networks of hydrology, ecology, infrastructure, policy, and community needs," wrote Catherine Frampton, an MLA candidate who took two of Yao's studios. Brent Fortenberry, Interim Director of the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture, put it plainly: "She trains her students to be not only effective landscape architects but also better citizens who serve their communities."
In landscape architecture, design decisions shape how water moves and whether communities can withstand the next storm. Yao's students leave knowing that getting those decisions right requires something more than technical knowledge—it requires the ability to listen, translate, and explain across audiences who rarely share the same vocabulary.
About the Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Innovative C-I Teacher Award
The Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Innovative C-I Teacher Award recognizes, inspires, and continues to support innovation in C-I course/assignment design, teaching, assessment/feedback practices, classroom management, and teaching productivity/efficiency/effectiveness. Any LSU faculty member—tenured, tenure-track, or non-tenure track, full or part-time—who has taught a certified C-I course within the past three semesters and has not previously received this award is eligible. Recipients receive a $500 award. This award is named in honor of Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, an internationally recognized scholar of communication-intensive pedagogy and the founder of LSU’s Communication across the Curriculum program.