Building Strong Geoscience Departments: Case Studies and Findings from Six Years of Programming

Begun in 2005, the Building Strong Geoscience Departments project sought to help geoscience departments respond to changes in geosciences research, academic pressures, and the changing face of the geosciences workforce by working as a team, planning strategically, and learning from the experiences of other geoscience departments. Key strategies included becoming more central to their institution's mission and goals; articulating the department's learning goals for students; designing coordinated curricula, co-curricular activities, and assessments to meet these goals; and recruiting students effectively. A series of topical workshops identified effective practices in use in the U.S. and Canada. These practices were documented on the project website and disseminated through a national workshop for teams of faculty, through activities at the AGU Heads and Chairs workshops, and in a visiting workshop program bringing leaders to campuses. The program has now involved over 450 participants from 185 departments. To understand the impact of the program, we engaged in ongoing discussion with five departments of various sizes and institutional types, and facing a variety of immediate challenges. In aggregate they made use of the full spectrum of project offerings. These departments all reported that the project brought an important new perspective to their ability to work as a department: they have a better understanding of how their departments' issues relate to the national scene, have more strategies for making the case for the entire department to college administrators, and are better poised to make use of campus resources including the external review process. These results were consistent with findings from end-of-workshop surveys. Further they developed the ability to work together as a team to address departmental challenges through collective problem solving. As a result of their workshop participation, two of the departments who considered their department to be vulnerable to elimination believe they are in a better position to survive and thrive. All five departments reported changes to their curriculum that addressed goals such as attracting more majors, recruiting students from underrepresented groups and integrating initiatives such as service learning. Three departments reported making strides to increase their visibility by implementing new community activities, involving alumni, and using social networking. Two departments became more intentional in collecting data for assessment/external review. As one department member shared, they learned that it was not enough to just teach and to do good research, they became their own advocates for change and believe it made a significant difference in their success on campus.