This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Southern Illinois Undergraduate Recruitment and Retention in Geoscience Education (SURRGE) is a three-year project working toward enhancing diversity in the geosciences at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) by: 1) identifying the factors responsible for the low recruitment and retention of underrepresented minorities in the geosciences and contributing to this literature, 2) establishing a program of classroom and field experiences to increase the number of underrepresented minorities who choose and complete an academic degree in the geosciences, and 3) exposing students to the cultural relevance of the geosciences at critical junctures (e.g., high school to college) toward this career path and balancing the academic challenge of these endeavors with instructional strategies derived from Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
Partners involved in this project include SIUC's Departments of Curriculum & Instruction and Geography, Research-Enriched Academic Challenge (REACH), and McNair Scholars program; and the Illinois Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (ILSAMP). The project aligns several programs and courses at SIUC by expanding and strengthening existing resources to establish a secondary-through-graduate school "pipeline" of underrepresented minorities in the geosciences. This interdisciplinary approach will expose students to the cultural, political, and economic impact of past and present episodes of human and environment interaction. Through opportunities to engage in hands-on, field-based research related to the cultural relevance of the geosciences, students from ethnically and linguistically diverse backgrounds will be able to develop academic skills related to reading comprehension, historical reasoning, media literacy, and quantitative reasoning. The expected outcomes for this project are a positive impact on participants' academic achievement and an epistemological shift in their beliefs about the geosciences, thus influencing their career aspirations. Over the course of three years, an estimated 1200 undergraduate students and 50 high school students will experience the curriculum developed for this project.
