RESEARCH ON ACCESS AND SUCCESS OF UNDER-REPRESENTED GROUPS IN THE GEOSCIENCES: RESULTS FROM THE COMMUNITY FRAMEWORK FOR GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION RESEARCH

The geoscience education community recently concluded work on a synthesis of research progress and priorities across many areas of GER inquiry. Among these was a working group focused on the state of research into access and success of under-represented groups in the geosciences. This effort involved team members who had also prepared review articles for the 2017 special issue of the Journal of Geoscience Education synthesizing the current state of GER research. Our charge was to broadly assess the literature on access and success for underrepresented groups in geoscience, and to identify the most urgent and necessary research directions moving forward. The “Access and Success” working group concluded that there are two overarching grand challenges, each with sets of supporting research threads and questions. The full framework is freely available on the NAGT website as part of the Community Framework for Geoscience Education Research.

We framed these grand challenges as two interdependent perspectives, specifically: (1) the point of view of the individual students, faculty and professionals as they manage their own internal balance of identities while they traverse curricula, programs and career pathways, and (2) a view that captures system-wide interactions around the individuals at all stages, including family, culture, department, university and society.

Grand Challenge 1: Supporting the Individual in the Geosciences: How can we recognize and support the individual identities and personal pathways of students as they are attracted to and thrive in the geosciences? Many of these issues are well-informed by research outside the geosciences, and we have the programmatic experience and our community has access to more nuanced theory to make significant steps forward in understanding program design and student pathways.

Grand Challenge 2: Geoscience Community Efforts to Broaden Participation: How can the geoscience community capitalize on evidence from different scale efforts to broaden participation?Solutions and programs must scale appropriately to the situation and communities. Success and solutions in diversity has no singular solution - healthy programs and communities who are diverse and welcoming exhibit sets of characteristics which are repeated.