Title: Changing the Culture of Coastal, Ocean, and Marine Sciences: Strategies for Individual and Collective Actions
Geoscience is plagued with structural and systemic barriers that prevent people of historically excluded groups from fully participating in, contributing to, and accruing the benefits of geosciences. A change in the culture of our learning and working environments is required to dismantle barriers and promote belonging, accessibility, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in our field. Inspired by a session organized at the 2020 Ocean Sciences Meeting, the goal of this paper is to provide a consolidated summary of a few innovative and broadening participation initiatives that are being led by various stakeholders in academia (e.g., students, faculty, administrative leaders) at different institutional levels (e.g., universities, professional societies). The authors hope that the strategies outlined in this paper will inspire the coastal, ocean, and marine science community to take individual and collective actions that lead to a positive culture change. more »« less
Pembridge, J. J.; Wilson, T. A.; Roa, O. E.(
, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)
null
(Ed.)
This RESEARCH paper examines faculty perceptions regarding the use of Scrum for departmental operations. Scrum is an agile methodology that applies processes and procedures that encourage transparency, inspection, and adaptation in the creation of a product. Across the literature for engineering education change, there has been a focus on identifying the barriers and affordances to cultural change in engineering departments. The objective of this paper is to examine the driving factors and barriers to implementing Scrum for departmental operations. The paper will specifically address how a group of faculty about to adopt Scrum perceive the impact of that adoption on potential changes to departmental operations and culture. Findings indicate concerns with the traditional barriers of time and workload. However, they also indicate that there is some expectation for Scrum to decrease elements of the faculty workload and reduce time to complete tasks. These findings also build on the understanding of how faculty collaboration is perceived as both a barrier and affordance to departmental change.
Ngai, Courtney; Pilgrim, Mary E.; Reinholz, Daniel L.; Corbo, Joel C.; Quan, Gina M.; Offerdahl, Erika(
, CBE—Life Sciences Education)
Departments are now recognized as an important locus for sustainable change on university campuses. Making sustainable changes typically requires a shift in culture, but culture is complex and difficult to measure. For this reason, cultural changes are often studied using qualitative methods that provide rich, detailed data. However, this imposes barriers to measuring culture and studying change at scale (i.e., across many departments). To address this issue, we introduce the Departmental Education and Leadership Transformation Assessment (DELTA), a new survey aimed at capturing cultural changes in undergraduate departments. We describe the survey’s development and validation and provide suggestions for its utility for researchers and practitioners.
Murphy, Eugene J.; Johnston, Nadine M.; Hofmann, Eileen E.; Phillips, Richard A.; Jackson, Jennifer A.; Constable, Andrew J.; Henley, Sian F.; Melbourne-Thomas, Jessica; Trebilco, Rowan; Cavanagh, Rachel D.; et al(
, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution)
null
(Ed.)
Southern Ocean ecosystems are globally important. Processes in the Antarctic atmosphere, cryosphere, and the Southern Ocean directly influence global atmospheric and oceanic systems. Southern Ocean biogeochemistry has also been shown to have global importance. In contrast, ocean ecological processes are often seen as largely separate from the rest of the global system. In this paper, we consider the degree of ecological connectivity at different trophic levels, linking Southern Ocean ecosystems with the global ocean, and their importance not only for the regional ecosystem but also the wider Earth system. We also consider the human system connections, including the role of Southern Ocean ecosystems in supporting society, culture, and economy in many nations, influencing public and political views and hence policy. Rather than Southern Ocean ecosystems being defined by barriers at particular oceanic fronts, ecological changes are gradual due to cross-front exchanges involving oceanographic processes and organism movement. Millions of seabirds and hundreds of thousands of cetaceans move north out of polar waters in the austral autumn interacting in food webs across the Southern Hemisphere, and a few species cross the equator. A number of species migrate into the east and west ocean-basin boundary current and continental shelf regions of the major southern continents. Human travel in and out of the Southern Ocean region includes fisheries, tourism, and scientific vessels in all ocean sectors. These operations arise from many nations, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, and are important in local communities as well as national economic, scientific, and political activities. As a result of the extensive connectivity, future changes in Southern Ocean ecosystems will have consequences throughout the Earth system, affecting ecosystem services with socio-economic impacts throughout the world. The high level of connectivity also means that changes and policy decisions in marine ecosystems outside the Southern Ocean have consequences for ecosystems south of the Antarctic Polar Front. Knowledge of Southern Ocean ecosystems and their global connectivity is critical for interpreting current change, projecting future change impacts, and identifying integrated strategies for conserving and managing both the Southern Ocean and the broader Earth system.
Less than 2% of graduate students and 1% of tenured faculty in Earth, atmospheric, and ocean sciences identify as Black or African-American. Discussions about diversifying ocean sciences are incomplete without acknowledging the distinctive challenges faced by Black women. We present new survey data on the dominant barriers to entry within the field, which can result from racism and discrimination, financial difficulties, and lack of accessibility. We also discuss mitigation strategies that can be employed, with the hope that the entire ocean science community can collaborate to foster a culture of inclusion. We cannot have a healthy ocean if we do not support everyone who wants to study it.
Edoga, E; Bergman, M. Hipwell; Polycarpou, A; Seets, D. C; Watson, K.; Srinivasa, A. R.(
, ASEE annual conference)
This work in progress (WIP) paper describes a National Science Foundation funded RED (Revolutionizing
Engineering Departments) Adaptation and Implementation (A&I) grant focused on changing the culture of
a large traditional mechanical engineering department at Texas A&M University (TAMU) and is an
adaptation of the “Additive Innovations” model developed by Arizona State University in their RED project[1]. The TAMU RED project is focused entirely on culture change via faculty development, with the goal of shifting from a culture where teaching is secondary to research and courses evolve via sporadic,
undocumented, individual innovations to a culture that recognizes teaching’s role in both faculty and student success and encourages a sustained process of incremental improvement and responsiveness to student learning through experimentation, measurement, and sharing. Two key levers in this culture change are (a) a faculty development series focused on innovation and data-driven change and (b) the creation of communities of practice[] or “soft wired’’ teams that support each other and sustain incremental change
across semesters as faculty cycle in and out of courses. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to enhance a departmental culture in Mechanical Engineering where faculty regularly discuss current curricular effectiveness and are empowered to develop pedagogical innovations that enable all students and faculty to thrive.
Behl, Mona, Cooper, Sharon, Garza, Corey, Kolesar, Sarah, Legg, Sonya, Lewis, Jonathan, White, Lisa, and Jones, Brandon.
"Changing the Culture of Coastal, Ocean, and Marine Sciences: Strategies for Individual and Collective Actions". Oceanography 34 (3). Country unknown/Code not available. https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2021.307.https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10320321.
@article{osti_10320321,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Changing the Culture of Coastal, Ocean, and Marine Sciences: Strategies for Individual and Collective Actions},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10320321},
DOI = {10.5670/oceanog.2021.307},
abstractNote = {Geoscience is plagued with structural and systemic barriers that prevent people of historically excluded groups from fully participating in, contributing to, and accruing the benefits of geosciences. A change in the culture of our learning and working environments is required to dismantle barriers and promote belonging, accessibility, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in our field. Inspired by a session organized at the 2020 Ocean Sciences Meeting, the goal of this paper is to provide a consolidated summary of a few innovative and broadening participation initiatives that are being led by various stakeholders in academia (e.g., students, faculty, administrative leaders) at different institutional levels (e.g., universities, professional societies). The authors hope that the strategies outlined in this paper will inspire the coastal, ocean, and marine science community to take individual and collective actions that lead to a positive culture change.},
journal = {Oceanography},
volume = {34},
number = {3},
author = {Behl, Mona and Cooper, Sharon and Garza, Corey and Kolesar, Sarah and Legg, Sonya and Lewis, Jonathan and White, Lisa and Jones, Brandon},
}
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