The ALIGNED Project
Addressing Locally-tailored Information Infrastructure & Geoscience Needs for Enhancing Diversity
Where do we look to attract a more diverse group of students to our program? And what do we do once we find them?
These are common questions asked at the departmental level, the reproductive core of our discipline and the place where students enter and engage with universities through their majors. Despite growing national support for broadening participation in higher education, increasing university- level commitment to pursue goals of inclusion at their institutions, and widespread agreement with the goal of enhancing diversity within departments, undergraduate and graduate advisors can often find themselves at a loss for where and how to engage potential students from traditionally underrepresented populations.
Answering questions which include the interrogative “where” are quite familiar to many geographers, although in too few instances have we collectively directed this valuable academic perspective to applications for recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups within departments. Insights from existing geographic research and information systems awaits application to the design of knowledge-based, placespecific, locationally-informed strategies to enhance diversity in geography programs, enabling departments to define appropriate collective visions of diversity and devise effective and feasible plans to reach recruitment and retention goals.
To launch a process of collecting our current disciplinary insight to directly support the way departments address diversity in geography, the AAG has proposed and received funding from the National Science Foundation’s Opportunities for Enhancing Diversity in the Geosciences Program for a project “Addressing Locally-tailored Information Infrastructure & Geoscience Needs for Enhancing Diversity.”
⇒ Learn more about the ALIGNED approach
NSF Award OEDG #0914645
Our advisors with expertise in geosciences, education, diversity, spatial analysis and other relevant fields are contributing their extensive experience working with diversity enhancement on their campuses, including from community colleges to doctoral universities at a broad set of geographic locations across the country. The diverse team itself represents traditionally underrepresented groups, including women, ethnic minority, gay, and foreign-born researchers in recognition of the value of multiple perspectives to help 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 geography and geoscience careers.
