SERVING GEOSCIENCE AS A PALATABLE OPTION TO AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS (Invited Presentation)

The STEM fields have been notably underrepresented among minority students and graduates (Figueroa & Hurtado, 2013) and perhaps none more glaringly than the geosciences (Beane et al., 2021; Dutt, 2020). An article in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education discusses the results of the study by Beane, et al. (2021) with the title “Study Identifies the Whitest Corner of the STEM World”. Despite efforts to address this underrepresentation over decades, very little change has occurred (Bernard & Cooperdock, 2018; Williams-Stroud, 2020). Although geoscience is seldom at the top of the list for African American students considering careers in STEM fields, it is demonstrably critical for issues of community health, hazard mitigation, and environmental equity. This talk will present some of the demographic statistics in the geosciences over the years, examples of efforts around addressing the underrepresentation of BIPOC students, examination of what seems to work and what doesn’t, with a mix of personal anecdotes sprinkled in from the perspective of a geoscientist with a career spanning roughly the same length as data on efforts to diversity are available. The serving of geoscience to BIPOC students so that they will take up the profession at the same rate as their non-BIPOC counterparts will benefit from seasoning it with a bit more community relevance. Given the current interest of the scientific community in environmental impacts and social justice, this approach should bear fruit in the next years while simultaneously maintaining focus on these important issues, creating a scientific pathway that should be easy for current professional geoscientists to integrate into their research. Retention of the recruited students and future professionals also needs to be addressed so that workforce diversity moves to an equilibrium representative state. The experiences of existing successful programs show that accomplishing this requires building cohorts of students and their supporters so that students other than those who don’t mind being “the only one” will also participate and continue in the field. Finally, this talk will include a very brief description of the work we are doing via a partnership between 9 universities and 4 state geological surveys to implement such a program.