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The geosciences have the lowest racial and ethnic diversity of all STEM fields at all levels of higher education, and atmospheric science is emblematic of this discrepancy. Despite a growing awareness of the problem, Black, Indigenous, people of color, persons with disabilities, women, and LGBTQIA+ persons continue to be largely absent in academic programs and in the geoscience workforce. There is a desire and need for new approaches, new entry points, and higher levels of engagement to foster a diverse community of researchers, scholars, and practitioners in atmospheric science. One challenge among many is that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are often siloed from many aspects of the scientific process, technical training, and scientific community. We have worked toward bridging this gap through the development of a new atmospheric science course designed to break down traditional barriers for entry into diversity, equity, and inclusion engagement by graduate students, so they emerge better prepared to address issues of participation, representation, and inclusion. This article provides an overview of our new course, focused on social responsibility in atmospheric science. This course was piloted during Fall 2021 with the primary objective to educate and empower graduate students to be “diversity champions” in our field. We describe 1) the rationale for a course of this nature within a graduate program, 2) course design and content, 3) service-learning projects, 4) impact of the course on students, and 5) scalability to other atmospheric science graduate programs.
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Ten simple rules for creating and sustaining antiracist graduate programs
In 2020, the combination of police killings of unarmed Black people, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic brought about public outrage over long-standing inequalities in society. The events of 2020 ignited global attention to systemic racism and racial inequalities, including the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy and especially in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. Racial and ethnic diversity in graduate programs in particular warrants special attention as graduate students of color report experiencing alarming rates of racism, discrimination, microaggressions, and other exclusionary behaviors. As part of the Graduate Dean’s Advisory Council on Diversity (GDACD) at the University of California Merced, the authors of this manuscript held a year-long discussion on these issues and ways to take meaningful action to address these persistent issues of injustices. We have outlined 10 rules to help graduate programs develop antiracist practices to promote racial and ethnic justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in the academy. We focus on efforts to address systemic causes of the underrepresentation and attrition of students from minoritized communities. The 10 rules are developed to allow graduate groups to formulate and implement rules and policies to address root causes of underrepresentation of minoritized students in graduate education.
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- PAR ID:
- 10416595
- Editor(s):
- Schwartz, Russell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PLOS Computational Biology
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 1553-7358
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e1010516
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010516
