Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
This collaboration grant will enhance the quality of education available toundergraduate and graduate students by providing robust opportunities for experiential learning (at no financial cost to the students) and addressing challenges that have been a hindrance to underserved students' participation in existing experiential learning programs. Three key components this project will introduce are the inclusion of need-based scholarships, integration of graduate and undergraduate student activities in Texas and Puerto Rico, and incorporating inclusivity training for all participants. These elements will build on an existing core of mentored research, service learning, and adventure, all with a focus on underserved student success.Through this project, >1000 K12 students, 80 undergraduate students, and 30 graduate studentswill receive experiential learning opportunities and benefits of the program (namely field research, service learning, leadership development, student and faculty exchange, adventure learning, career insights and skills development sought by USDA and other agricultural andnatural resource employers), and these students and at least 17 faculty from across the country will receive formal inclusivity training for field-based experiential learning and inclusive pedagogy. These activities would not occur in the absence of this proposed project. This project is anticipated to impact an estimated 70 students even more deeply through >1 year of fullparticipation as part of a diverse community engaged in learning activities in the outdoors and through the provision of need-based scholarships to many of them. Additional students willbenefit from the project by engaging in single experiential learning activities only, but these have the potential to be life-changing and career-shaping nonetheless.
Animal Health Component
90%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
10%
Applied
90%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
The project described in this proposal has been specifically designed to attract and support undergraduate and graduate students, as well as outstanding high school students, from underrepresented groups to prepare them for careers related to the food, agricultural, natural resources, and human systems and sciences in the United States.Objective 1: Enhance efforts to recruit underserved populations into natural resource degree programs, providing information to at least 1000 high school students.Objective 2: Create curriculum for USDA career exposure, inclusivity training, and leadership development.Objective 3: Collaborate with NRCS to provide service learnign experiences and career exposure to underserved studentsObjective 4: Provide leadership development to program participantsObjective 5: Provide opportunities for underrgaduates to interact with graduate students to better understand the graduate school experience.Objective 6: Provide opportunities for graduate students to serve as mentors to undergraduate students.Objective 7: Offer scholarships to 35 student participants.Objective 8: Offer program experience to 40 undergraduates, including at least 32 underserved students.Objective 9: Offer program experience to 30 graduate studentsObjective 10: Draw in at least 15 students who otherwise would not have pursued a natural resource career without exposure to the program.Objective 11: Facilitate the publication of three manuscripts with graduate students acting as lead authors.A secondary goal is to share findings about the benefits of outdoor experiential learning with other researchers and educators.Objective 12: Disseminate pedagogical training through a workshop to at least 10 faculty from other institutions
Project Methods
We aim to enhance undergraduate programming by formalizing leadership development opportunities, offering course credit, providing need-based scholarships to help underserved students overcome financial barriers (improving program recruitment and impact for underserved students), and developing a novel partnership with a USDA agency, the NRCS.At both institutions, project co-PIs will implement field-based environmental conservation research courses for graduate students and a few carefully selected advanced undergraduate students. In one year, the context and content will specialize in tropical ecosystems in Puerto Rico and in the next, the context and associated content will focus on the more mesic environments of West Texas. For both campuses, graduate courses will integrate experiential learning and will be designed to engage students in the formulation of feasible research questions, experimental design, field data collection, analysis, and oral and written presentations of group findings. Students from both institutions will work together on "field problems" based on the course content to address questions they choose each year, in consultation with the co-PIs.The student applications used for participant selection will collect baseline data such as demographics and initial interest in agricultural sciences and careers. The evaluator will monitor the number of applicants each year to track recruitment efforts, including the effort to recruit Hispanic students and other underrepresented students as well as efforts to recruit prospective freshmen throughhigh school science and career fairs (see letters of support). Student retention will be tracked for all students entering the program, with a goal of 100% retention.Undergraduate participants will complete a pre-program Grit Scale assessment (Duckworth et al. 2007, Duckworth and Quinn 2009) and the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (Tyree 1998) to be compared with results from the same assessments taken after program completion. Each experiential learning activity (adventure excursion, session of field research, and alternative service break) will conclude with a personal reflection exercise. Student's reflections will be recorded and shared with the evaluator, to be used collectively in the final evaluation report.We will track the number of leadership experiences each program participant engages in and measure their perceptions of the cumulative impact of these experiences through their reflections and through the differences in pre- and post-program scores on the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale. Upon completion of two years in the program, each undergraduate participant will complete an exit interview with the evaluator to record everyone's perspective on program impacts.A formative evaluation, focused on graduate exchange program improvement, will determine how effectively the activities are implemented and the degree to which they produce the expected outcomes on the corresponding participants. Systematic assessments and recommendations for improvement of the implementation, progress, and outcomes of each activity will be provided based on what was planned, the expected outcomes, and any unexpected outcomes that may arise. The purpose is to provide constructive and ongoing feedback to enhance the effective accomplishment of the activities' established objectives.