Grand Challenge 2:

How can departments and programs support continuous improvement in undergraduate geoscience education?

Rationale

Undergraduate geoscience content is taught in a wide variety of departments and programs beyond only traditional geoscience or geology departments, including physical science departments at community colleges, departments focused on ocean, atmospheric science, and environmental science, and even embedded within courses taught by departments such as sociology and engineering. All of these departments and programs can be conceptualized as complex systems comprised of instructors, students, staff, and administrators, as well as curricula, courses, and assessment mechanisms, as well as physical structures such as classrooms and labs (Condon et al., 2016; Manduca, 2017). These systems support students' geoscience education, the professional environment of the instructor, and the long-term character and evolution of the degree program (Tobias, 1992; NASEM, 2016). Geoscience education research can assist departments, institutions, and professional development programs in understanding how these systems function to support students and instructors in learning.

Viewed from this systems perspective, in "healthy" departments and programs, new and potentially valuable ideas about teaching and learning enter the system continuously and are discussed, experimented with, and implemented freely (Manduca, 2017). A healthy department or program can respond and adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities, drawing on this capacity for learning. Considerations affecting the health of the program include teaching-related rewards structures; resources and opportunities for professional development; collegiality among faculty, students, and staff; leadership; and other factors (Andrews et al., 2016; Walter et al., 2014).

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Figure 3: Geoscience programs are complex systems made up of humans, physical structures (e.g. classrooms/labs), and conceptual structures (e.g., courses, curricula). In programs with healthy teaching cultures, new ideas about T&L continuously enter the system with minimal impediment; new ideas about T&L also flow outward and back into the community. Teaching cultures are developed and maintained within the program, but are also influenced by various larger complex systems (institutions, disciplines) within which they are embedded.

Provenance: Kelsey Bitting, Elon University
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While each geoscience department or program is a system unto itself, it is embedded within larger systems such as the college, institution, discipline and its component professional organizations, and local, national, and global societies, all of which exert various types of influences on the health of a department or program. Furthermore, individuals from a department or program may participate in communities of transformation that transcend individual disciplines (Gehrke & Kezar, 2016), and these ties may also contribute to systems health within a department or program. Thus, further work will need to clarify factors contributing to department or program health from both within (departmental climate) and beyond the department itself (e.g. academic advising, employers, disciplinary societies). An understanding of the departmental system and its response to both internal and external influences is foundational to sustaining the highest-quality geoscience education. This Grand Challenge is summarized in Figure 3.

Recommended Research Strategies

1. Collaborate with and draw upon the work of organizational psychologists who study workplace climate to conduct mixed-methods case studies describing the health of a variety of geoscience programs, including measures of departmental climate (e.g., Walter et al., 2014)and interviews with students, alumni, faculty (full- and part-time), staff, and administrators that seek to determine their perceptions of internal and external influences on teaching and learning information flow and changes in practice.
2. Based on those case studies, formulate hypotheses about internal and external variables that appear to have the greatest impact on department or program health, and design quantitative survey instruments to test those hypotheses across a representative subsection of geoscience departments and programs in the U.S.
3. Investigate how departments and programs that support high-quality undergraduate geoscience teaching evolved to that state. Longitudinal multi-case studies of departments and program from the range of institutional types would aid in addressing this strategy.
4. Identify what chairs/heads of a diverse range of departments and programs need to foster a teaching culture that supports high-quality undergraduate geoscience education and the extent to which they think those needs are being met. A critical incident analysis of chairs/heads experiences would assist the pursuit of this strategy.
5. Conduct social network analyses at a variety of scales within the geoscience education community, including departments and disciplinary societies, to identify the characteristics of change agents and to understand of how those change agents support program health.

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