Initial Publication Date: July 12, 2018

Grand Challenge 1:

Supporting the Individual in the Geosciences: How can we recognize and support the individual identities and personal pathways of students as they are attracted to and thrive in the geosciences?

Rationale

Many of these issues are now well-informed by research on the structure and nature of student science identity from outside the geosciences (cf. Jones & Abes, 2013), and we have the programmatic experience and our community have access to more nuanced theory to make significant steps forward in understanding program design and student pathways. For a review of background theory and application to the geosciences, see Callahan et al. (2017). A fundamental aspect of developing expertise in any discipline is the process of learning the language, normal practices, and habits of thinking specific to that discipline (Posner, 1988). While community college and undergraduate geoscience programs are arguably not producing experts—based on common definitions of expertise (e.g. Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993)—such programs do provide a substantial foundation for later training, education, and work experience. The geoscience community has articulated a suite of skills and understandings that students should acquire during their undergraduate education (Mosher, 2015); examples include: strong written and verbal communication skills; integration of observations in the natural world with experimental or modeling data; and solving problems requiring spatial, temporal, and uncertainty interpretations. The level to which students achieve these skills and understandings is one measure of a student's success in developing expertise. This metric for success, however, assumes equivalence of experiences in education; it makes no differentiation for the reality that students not only arrive in the geosciences along different pathways (Sherman-Morris & McNeal, 2016), but also carry with them other identities beyond the shared identity of a geoscientist. Thus, we propose the following question as an area in need of further research in order to improve access and success for underrepresented students in the geosciences: How can we recognize and support individual identities and personal pathways of students as they are attracted to and thrive in the geosciences? This broad question has two main facets in need of explication.

Recommended Research Strategies

  1. If we wish to recognize and support under-represented students' identities in the geosciences, we need to have a richer understanding of their lived experiences as members of the community. Callahan et al. (2015, 2017) argue for the importance of and suggest multiple theoretical frameworks from the social sciences that may be useful in this effort; for instance, Baber et al. (2010) used the theory of self-efficacy to investigate the success of summer research programs for recruiting minority students to the geosciences. Theoretically-driven research can build our understanding of whether and how students from underrepresented groups develop their geoscience identity alongside existing identities. In what ways are those identities compatible and in what ways are they in conflict?
  2. If our intent is to increase diversity in the discipline, we may also need to ask uncomfortable questions about how the "norms" of the community impose barriers to students from under-represented groups at all points as they flow through programs and curricula. Figure 2 presents a highly generalized, schematic model showing points of investigation using an Input-Environment-Output model for student experience. For example, photographs on websites for geoscience departments commonly feature outdoor environments, more men than women, and almost everyone is white (Sexton et al., 2014); are websites unintentionally sending a message of who fits the accepted role of an expert geoscientist and who does not? How is privilege implicit in the structure of programs and curricula? How can we integrate culturally-responsive pedagogy into geoscience curricula (e.g. Gay, 2010)? Ultimately, we recognize that how we define success may not change so readily; we posit, though, that there are ways to broaden our approach to how we move students toward geoscience expertise.