HR: 11:35h
AN: ED11C-06 INVITED     [PDF]
TI: Faculty Activity to Reach Consensus and Develop the SF-ROCKS Outreach Program
AU: * Grove, K
EM: kgrove@sfsu.edu
AF: San Francisco State University, Dept of Geosciences, San Francisco, CA 94132 United States
AU: White, L
EM: lwhite@sfsu.edu
AF: San Francisco State University, Dept of Geosciences, San Francisco, CA 94132 United States
AB: The Geosciences Department at San Francisco State University has prided itself on the excellent relationships among its faculty and students and on its proven ability to train students for careers in industry and academia. Yet, like many Geoscience departments, it recognized a need to generate higher enrollments in the undergraduate majors programs and to increase collaborations among departmental disciplines (in our case, geology, meteorology, and oceanography). To address these concerns, the department created a new outreach program that involves a majority of the faculty and that aims to increase the number of students (particularly those from underrepresented groups) who pursue a career in Geosciences at SFSU and who appreciate the role of the geosciences in their daily lives. The outreach idea was generated at a retreat of departmental faculty in January 2001. The department chair (Grove) used a classroom teaching technique to have faculty brainstorm ideas about increasing student enrollments and to reach consensus about actions to be taken. The faculty was divided into 4 groups of 3 members. Each group member spent 10 minutes brainstorming ideas and writing each idea on a post-it note. Group members then convened for 15 minutes to cluster their post-it note ideas into affinity groups. Each group subsequently had 10-15 minutes to present their ideas to the larger group, who then proceeded to decide on action items. From this activity came a clear consensus about the need for more outreach activities, and the faculty decided to submit a request for funding to a newly created NSF Geosciences program (OEDG---Opportunities for Enhancing Diversity in the Geosciences). Our proposal was successful and we received a 5-year grant to fund SF-ROCKS (Reaching out to Communities and Kids with Science in San Francisco), a program now in its second year and directed by the current department chair (White). The multi-layered program involves faculty and students from SFSU and City College of San Francisco with local high school teachers and their students (see session ED15 for high school student research results and program web site---http://sf-rocks.sfsu.edu---for more details). The program has created more cohesion among department faculty and has been an effective mechanism for engaging faculty and students from our range of Geoscience disciplines, and for providing college students with meaningful experiences in the discipline.
UR: http://tornado.sfsu.edu/
DE: 6319 Institutions
DE: 9810 New fields (not classifiable under other headings)
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting