Enhancing Departments and Graduate Education (EDGE)

The National Science Foundation, through its Research on Learning and Education (ROLE) program, has awarded the AAG a $980,393 grant for “Enhancing Departments and Graduate Education (EDGE) in Geography,” a three-year project to study the process of professional development in graduate geography.

The EDGE project will develop a methodology to interpret the social and academic climates of MA/MS and PhD geography programs. Particular attention will be given to the experiences of women, ethnic minority, gay, and foreign-born students who often become marginalized in traditional academic environments. The project will also collect and evaluate samples of professional development resources that departments are currently using to train graduate students, especially with regard to those aspects of academic work and culture that receive relatively little attention in today’s graduate curriculum (e.g., course design, career planning, project and time management, professional ethics, and writing proposals). With this information, the project will publish practical resources that chairpersons and departments can use to improve the quality of their graduate programs.

PI: Michael Solem. Co-PIs: Ken Foote, Janice Monk. Partners: Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education, Center for Assessment of Higher Education at the University of Maryland, Center for Innovation in Research on Graduate Education (CIRGE).

Using information compiled from the study, the AAG will develop practical resources that departments can use in orientation programs, advising programs, and professional development courses. The “EDGE Guide” will include four components:

• A printed manual with chapters dedicated to topics that many departments do not currently include as part of the formal graduate curriculum (e.g., course design, professional ethics, time and project management, career planning, writing grant proposals, and preparing manuscripts for publication).
• A multimedia CD of instructional and career-development resources that draw on principles of good practice in teaching and research.
• A set of programmatic assessments that departments can use to implement the recommendations outlined in the manual and CD.
• An interactive website that students can use to develop professional networks in the U.S. and internationally, share and exchange resources for improving their professional skills, and discuss issues related to life and work in graduate school.