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Resources for Geoscience Heads and Chairs

Workshop Program

Heads and Chairs of Earth and Space Science Departments

Sunday, 12 December 2021, AGU Fall Meeting, New Orleans, LA
Location: Hilton New Orleans Riverside, 2 Poydras St, New Orleans, LA 70130 (Churchill C1-C2 [second floor])

8:00-8:30 Breakfast

8:30-8:45 Plans for the day – Pranoti Asher, Assistant Director for Grants and Education Programs and Project Director for AGU Bridge Program, American Geophysical Union

  • Joint AGU LANDInG Academy and AGU Heads and Chairs Program Welcome (LANDInG co-PI team and Pranoti Asher, AGU Heads and Chairs program staff)
  • Logistics for the day
  • Introductions (all) - Name, title, and Institution only
  • Slides (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 5.3MB Dec12 21)

Morning Session

8:45-10:45 Impact and Evidence of DEI Challenges in (Geo)Science - Panel presentation

10:45-11:30 Panel Discussion with speakers

  • moderated by Billy Williams, Executive Vice President, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, AGU

Resources

11:30-12:30 Lunch and Networking

Box lunch and informal discussions.

Afternoon Session (Churchill, B1 [second floor])

12:30-2:20 The Hidden Curriculum: Making explicit the tacit knowledge of our disciplines and programs fosters inclusion (Michele Cooke, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Naomi Levin, University of Michigan)

In response to the crisis of diversity in the Geosciences, programs need deliberate structures to sustain inclusivity. As part of our own efforts to improve inclusive practices, we have built onboarding courses for graduate students that seek to make transparent the tacit knowledge needed to succeed in our discipline, sometimes called the hidden curriculum of graduate school, with lessons that could translate to undergraduates and postdocs. In this 90 minute workshop, facilitators will lead us in 1) reflection on ways that onboarding courses can foster inclusion, 2) discussion about strategies to meet the needs of our own programs, and 3) planning for implementation and assessment.

2:20-2:30 Break and transition

2:30-4:30 Systemic Change in Geoscience Education: Designing for Equity (Julie Posselt, University of Southern California and Casey Miller, Rochester Institute of Technology)

Reform sometimes gets a bad reputation — and for good reason. Decades of research finds that reform-minded change in organizations rarely leads to outcomes that can be sustained over time. And, when the desired outcome is related to equity, diversity, justice, or inclusion goals, reform efforts can be counterproductive if members do not also engage with underlying cultural tensions. This two-hour workshop is for leaders who are ready to go deeper with change— who want to collaboratively explore possibilities for redesigning the practices and systems by which we select and serve students. Facilitators will lead us in 1) reflection about positive case studies of Ph.D. programs that have realized systemic change, 2) discussion about the applications to our own programs, and 3) planning to address a concrete equity challenge from a systemic perspective.

4:30-4:40 Opportunities from NAGT and SERC (Anne Egger, NAGT (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 1.5MB Dec12 21); John McDaris, SERC (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 1.5MB Dec12 21))

4:40-4:50 Update from the American Geosciences Institute about Workforce Issues (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 4.8MB Dec12 21) (Christopher Keane, AGI)

4:50-5:00 Closing Remarks and Workshop Evaluation

5:00-5:30 Reception

This workshop is a collaboration between the Building Strong Geoscience Departments project and AGU. The workshop website is supported by NSF under grant DUE-0817353 to the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College.