Belonging on the Cutting Edge

The nation recognizes the urgent need to increase participation by groups currently underrepresented in STEM disciplines in order to meet the needs of the 21st century workforce and increase the scientific literacy of its citizens and communities. On the Cutting Edge, a collaboration between geoscience educators, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers and Science Education Resource Center (SERC), transformed the geoscience education community over the past two decades by creating a community of practice around active learning and student-centered classrooms. The resulting infrastructure, supporting a robust and growing resource collection and a complementary suite of workshop-based programs, is now poised to provide a platform for new, innovative professional development programming designed to meet the needs of geoscientists working at the forefront of improving academic culture and cultivating a sense of belonging for everyone.

On the Cutting Edge was a faculty-focused professional development program established in 2002 with funding from the National Science Foundation. More than 3,000 faculty, postdocs, and graduate students from over 900 institutions participated in more than 100 face-to-face and virtual workshops and community-based research projects over the course of the project, producing a website with more than 9,000 pages of content that is still visited by more than 800,000 users annually.

The current work will begin to map out new directions for On the Cutting Edge based on the experiences of people for whom the interventions are meant to most benefit, as well as those who have experience working in institutional change in geoscience education. These efforts will support the evolution of geoscience professional development programming, maximizing its utility and reach in meeting the current challenges related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in the geosciences. The results of this workshop will be disseminated to change agents across the STEM disciplines providing insight to others exploring the use of professional development programming to increase inclusive practices in higher education.

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