257-10 C-ChanGe: A Model and Resources for Catalyzing Positive Departmental Change

Session: Diversifying Geoscience Education Across the Academic Playing Field: Using Creative Methods to Foster the Current and Next Generations of Geoscience Professionals (Posters)

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The Cultural Change in Geoscience (C-ChanGe) project aimed to effect positive change in the culture of geoscience departments at four-year institutions as a lever to change the discipline as a whole.  The project built on earlier work by the Supporting and Advancing Geoscience in Two-Year Colleges (SAGE 2YC) project, using a cohort model to provide institutional teams of faculty multi-year professional development at a local level coupled with scaffolding at the national scale.

In its first year, employing both in-person and virtual meetings as well as asynchronous engagement, C-ChanGe provided a cohort of eight teams of faculty with structured professional development to implement impactful practices and perspectives developed in the wide array of change efforts underway across the STEM disciplines.  These teams of change agents identified issues of departmental culture at their institution, investigated practices to address those challenges, and reflected on their implementation through ongoing engagement in a community of practice.  Coupled with explicit leadership training, this process increased their capacity to lead local departmental change from a faculty position.  

Many aspects of the program were unfinished when NSF prematurely terminated the grant after only eight months. Materials from this professional development process have been made available on the C-ChanGe website so that change agents at other institutions can engage in this learning and work independently.  We encourage faculty members and administrators interested in making cultural changes in their own programs to consider these cohort models as a mechanism for bolstering and sustaining change efforts.  These materials will also form the core of an upcoming virtual workshop series aimed at helping faculty increase student success.  (https://serc.carleton.edu/c-change/index.html)

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

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