SUCCESS IN CREATING EDUCATIONAL EQUITY AND ACCESS FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS IN GEOSCIENCES - 25 YEARS OF AN INTERNATIONAL FACULTY'S WORK AT A RURAL HBCU

At the core of the American cultural spirit lies the concept of American dream which emphasizes that, in this society, education opens the door to success and greatness can be achieved with talent and hard work. In most instances, talent is equated with educational attainment. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) grew out of and were shaped by this striving of African Americans for education. HBCUs are an excellent source of underrepresented minority STEM majors, although they account for only 3% of US colleges and universities but have produced 27% of the African-American bachelor degrees in STEM. However geoscience is a “discovery science”, where students often don’t realize it is a career option until too late in their undergraduate years, and chances of discovering geosciences in college is extremely slim as there are only few geoscience programs at HBCUs. Geoscience lags behind almost all other Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines with respect to diversity. The single geoscience faculty at FVSU for the past twenty-five years has implemented some of the best practices that are documented in literature to play vital roles in building successful STEM diversity programs. For example establishing a peer support group, opportunities for undergraduate research including international, mentoring, exposure to role models, coordinated social support, awareness of factors that produce stress and anxiety among African-Americans, navigating through courses, financial challenges; studying frequently with others and moving the students in cohorts. Thus, FVSU has built a highly successful diversity program in geosciences and with its partner organizations, has provided a supportive geoscience learning ecosystem (GLE) for 47 African-American students who have received geoscience bachelor degrees in the past two and half decades with just over one third of the graduates coming from FVSU’s STEM precollegiate (9th-12th grade) summer pipeline program.