GEOPAths UP: Geoscience on-ramps for HBCU STEM majors

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Geoscience lags behind almost all other Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines with respect to diversity; for example from 2001 to 2010 the nation graduated 539 African American geoscientists, which was a mere 1.6% of the geoscience degrees. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) 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. This project will enhance the undergraduate experience through sustained new multi- and academic-year research, and experiential learning activities that nurture students’ quest for geologic knowledge, and provide new mentorship and access to professional networking and career pathways in the geosciences. Overall, this project seeks to couple education research and education practice with institutional capacity for preparing a professional workforce with skills that tomorrow’s employers need, both through direct engagement with students and sharing of successful strategies with other organizations and institutions of higher learning. The project activities are designed to increase the number of African-American students who graduate with the intention of pursuing a geoscience-related career either by applying to graduate school or directly entering the workforce. The overall program is also designed to be a model which could be adopted by lone geoscientists at other HBCUs or Minority Serving Institutions, in collaboration with other STEM faculty members and outside organizations. In this model, some of the geoscience is introduced in other science courses where the students hone on the quantitative and analytical skills needed to be successful in the geosciences. To confront the challenge of a lack of diversity in geoscience, the PIs will develop a sequence of interconnected geoscience opportunities that will build on an existing, highly successful diversity program at Fort Valley State University (FVSU), a rural HBCU in middle Georgia that along 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. This new program will provide resources and support to engage and retain an even larger community of students from entry to college through to graduation and preparation for graduate school or a career, and can be a model for other HBCUs that do not currently offer a geoscience degree. The program will create a GLE that engages students already enrolled in a normal 4-year degree program in other STEM fields at FVSU. This program will provide them with learning experiences that explore interdisciplinary real-world societal issues that can be addressed via geoscience approaches, with a goal of encouraging more HBCU students to pursue geoscience careers or graduate school. The project has six interrelated objectives: 1) Increase the number of first year undergraduate African-American students who are introduced to geoscience. 2) Establish new multi-year, academic-year and summer geoscience opportunities for undergraduate students at the awardee institution and through partnership with the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and other organizations. 3) Enrich the academic preparation of students in STEM disciplines by focusing on developing 3 one-hour courses as a part of a new Minor in Geology at FVSU. 4) Broaden and strengthen faculty professional development opportunities in computational science and infuse technology into teaching to enhance students’ computational skills. 5) Strengthen partnerships with academic institutions and industrial labs to enhance quality research experiences for students. 6) Develop an enhanced service-learning component for the GLE, leveraging the FVSU iHelp community volunteering program. A unique aspect of this project is that it provides a model where a lone geoscientist in an HBCU non-geoscience STEM department working with an NSF facility, can both help strengthen the STEM department by retaining and graduating a larger number of students as well as introduce geoscience to over 500 mostly African-American and other underrepresented minority (URM) STEM majors over the length of the grant who would otherwise be unaware of the opportunities in geoscience.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.