Challenges and Opportunities from a Semester of Anti-Racist Geoscience Curriculum: Lessons from the School of Earth & Sustainability URGE Pod at Northern Arizona University

The Northern Arizona University (NAU) School of Earth and Sustainability (SES) URGE pod includes ten current and former graduate students and one professor. Our experience with URGE has been collaborative, with multiple pod members contributing to each deliverable, and a rotating discussion leader at bi-weekly pod meetings during the Spring 2021 semester. We have identified several opportunities and challenges that characterize our pods participation in the URGE curriculum. For example, we created deliverables that can be used immediately and have potential to improve the schools culture with regard to anti-racism (e.g., reporting policy, field code of conduct and safety plan, resource map). The graduate students participating in the pod gained valuable leadership experience, as well as training to be anti-racist geoscience leaders. We are also excited to work with the NAU Department of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences URGE pod; we have identified opportunities for collaboration on JEDI initiatives, and believe that we have greater potential to affect anti-racist change at the institutional level with a joint departmental approach. Despite these successes and the promise of further progress, this experience was not without its challenges. At times it was difficult to navigate the curriculum as a group dominated by graduate students, because we did not have access to information at the school or university level. We also lacked the power to create meaningful deliverables for policies that are dictated at the university level, such as some admissions and hiring practices. It was challenging to integrate the URGE curriculum into the work of our relatively new SES Diversity & Inclusion committee, because not all committee members participated in URGE. Our School is highly interdisciplinary, and often feels divided between geology and environmental science, with unique challenges in each discipline. COVID-19 posed further obstacles, and strained departmental resources. We hope to overcome these and other challenges by taking advantage of opportunities for meaningful policy change, growth, and collaboration revealed through our participation in URGE. We expect to engage more members of our SES and NAU communities as we use our knowledge from URGE to motivate anti-racist policy changes now and in the future.