Initial Publication Date: March 3, 2014

On the Cutting Edge Workshops and Web Resources for Early Career Geoscience Faculty

The Early Career Geoscience Faculty Workshop focusses on teaching, research, and career management. The workshops are designed to be interactive, to emphasize participant learning, and to model effective teaching practices. The workshop design includes plenary sessions, table discussions, concurrent sessions, informal discussions, individual consultation with workshop leaders, and a poster session. We provide opportunities for participants to interact, to share experience and knowledge, and to reflect on and develop action plans. We focus on concrete suggestions and ask participants to consider how they might apply strategies in their teaching and research and in their professional lives.

Workshop Title: Workshop for Early Career Geoscience Faculty: Teaching, Research, and Managing Your Career

Discipline: Geoscience

Workshop Leaders: Heather Macdonald, College of William & Mary (1999-2011) and Rachel Beane, Bowdoin College (2012 to present) have been the lead conveners of the workshop. Each workshop is led by two or more conveners and several additional leaders assembled from the spectrum of institutional types. The workshop was first offered in 1999.

Since 2002, it has been offered as one of the workshops in On the Cutting Edge, a national professional development program for current and future geoscience faculty. Leaders in the first years included Barbara Tewksbury (Hamilton College), David Mogk (Montana State University), Bob Newton (Smith College), Randy Richardson (University of Arizona), Steve Semken (Diné College), and Ken Verosub (University of California, Davis). In the past several years, conveners have included Richelle Allen-King (University of Buffalo, SUNY) and Richard Yuretich (University of Massachusetts, Amherst). Carol Ormand (Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College) created the online resources for early-career geoscience faculty.

Funding Source(s): National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education

Cost per participant: Has varied as location, lodging options, number of leaders, web support, and evaluation have changed over time (~$1000-2300 per participant, with participants paying the cost of their travel).

Costs/Fees paid by the participants (or their home institutions): Has varied. In early years, travel costs were paid by the participants or their home institution and onsite expenses were covered by grants. Currently, travel costs and a registration fee of $645 are paid by the participants or their home institutions. We offer stipends to participants from institutions that do not have resources to provide for the travel costs and/or registration fees.

Target Audience: Geoscience faculty in their first four years of full-time teaching, including those who will start a faculty position in the fall. Participants include faculty from across the geosciences (geologists, marine scientists, meteorologists, atmospheric scientists) and from two-year colleges, four-year colleges, comprehensive universities, and research universities.

Typical Attendance: 40-50 faculty participants per year

Workshop Duration: four days with an optional one-day visit to the National Science Foundation

When Offered: once a year in the summer

Workshop websites: Web resources specifically designed for early-career geoscience faculty were created by Carol Ormand of the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College; these are part of On the Cutting Edge resources:
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/earlycareer/index.html

2012 Early Career Geoscience Faculty workshop website:
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/earlycareer2012/index.html

On the Cutting Edge website:
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/index.html

Program Description (Acrobat (PDF) 418kB Feb14 14)