The PIs plan to create a professional development curriculum that is highly tailorable to an individual's particular institutional context. They seek to recruit 10 Seeding Diversity Fellows from 10 different universities who will then bring on board another two partners to join the team. Each team of three will then identify gatekeeping mechanisms that impede the ability of their particular institution to recruit, retain, and include diverse faculty and students in the geosciences. The proposed curriculum will implement and research an innovative use of social network analysis as a tool for participants to identify potential collaborators so that, together, they can collectively change departmental beliefs and behaviors. The PIs will also develop and research three, new, mixed-reality simulations that combine artificial intelligence with human conversational intuition to teach participants how to manage conflicts while advocating for systemic changes in university and departmental procedures. Building off of the work from the pilot GOLD:GeoDES project, these new simulations will extend beyond individual actions and move more toward coordinating and leveraging social networks to effect institutional change.The PI's proposed professional development curriculum includes the following two innovations: 1. Helping participants to identify and analyze their social networks to select two additional key individuals with whom to collaborate to change collective behaviors in a department. In the pilot GeoDES project, the PIs recognized that changing collective behaviors of a department is a heavier lift than changing individual behaviors and beliefs. 2. Making use of innovative mixed-reality simulations that combine artificial intelligence with human conversational intuition to teach participants how to manage conflicts while advocating for systemic changes in university and departmental procedures. The project's innovation rests on the idea that changing the behavior of many people within a department requires a robust intervention grounded in strong theoretical foundations that have shown promising results.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
