Track 1: Departments and Underrepresented Students ALIGNED: Addressing Locally-tailored Information Infrastructure & Geoscience Needs for Enhancing Diversity

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The Association of American Geographers (AAG) is working to align the needs of university departments and underrepresented students by Addressing Locally-tailored Information Infrastructure & Geoscience Needs for Enhancing Diversity. The ALIGNED Project will support the development of knowledge-driven, place-based, and locationally-tailored plans for recruitment and retention at the department level where students enter and engage with universities through their majors. This project seeks to support underrepresented youth to learn just where and how they might transform their personal interests into career goals, and mobilize and retool departments with better ways to learn where to find and how to connect with underrepresented groups, including how to convey the relevance of geoscience careers. This model program will integrate knowledge of, from, and about places and the realities of communities living in them and will identify and incorporate research about migration patterns, commuting patterns, and choices and preferences that lead to geographic behavior, and in doing so demonstrate the importance of geographic concepts and technologies as applied to the science of broadening participation. The project will design and test an innovative toolkit that combines a spatial decision support system prototype and an online clearinghouse of materials for increasing diversity in higher education. ALIGNED will reach out to 52 hybrid geography/geoscience departments in 27 states, and will help a pilot group of 7 programs to integrate knowledge and best practices about where and how to engage underrepresented groups in their local catchments. Other deliverables are a geoscience symposium reflecting on emerging research themes, a Diversity Ambassadors peer mentor exchange framework, a scholarly publication, and strengthened collaborations among the AAG, geography/geosciences departments, the National Association of Colleges and Employers, American Association of Persons with Disabilities, American Association of Community Colleges, White House Commission on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Association of Colleges & Universities, and American Indian Higher Education Consortium, among others.