Encouraging, Recognizing, and Rewarding DEIJ Work by Aligning Evaluation Systems with Strategic Goals

The geosciences, which include meteorology, climate, and atmospheric sciences, have an ethical obligation to increase the low racial and ethnic diversity among our geoscience students, faculty, and professionals. While working to improve DEIJ in our departments, institutions, and workplaces takes additional time and effort, this work is often unrewarded in evaluation systems. We interviewed and surveyed Geoscience faculty to investigate who is engaging in inclusive teaching and other DEJI work and how that work may or may not be valued in evaluation and tenure/promotion criteria. We found that faculty engagement varied significantly among different types of institutions, career stages, genders, and races/ethnicities. Most participants reported that <50% of faculty in their department engage in DEI work and those faculty are disproportionately non-male, early career, and/or underrepresented in terms of race/ethnicity. Many participants reported that clearer expectations and evaluation criteria would motivate them to increase their engagement. However, most participants indicated that inclusive teaching and other forms of DEIJ work are not clearly valued in annual evaluations or tenure and promotion criteria. To address the disconnect between strategic goals and evaluation and reward systems within the Geosciences, we convened a NAGT webinar aimed at sharing background research and examples to help departments develop evaluation criteria that can be used to recognize and reward DEIJ work. We used a Universal Design approach, where evaluations would recognize a wide range of faculty activities, rather than valuing only a few types of products or outcomes. Webinar participants worked collaboratively to develop evaluation criteria that can be adapted to align with the strategic goals within geoscience departments. Recommendations from the webinar: https://nagt.org/nagt/profdev/webinars/eval_value_dei/index.html . Participants reported that the webinar provided both 1) example evaluation criteria, and 2) a model they can follow for reassessing evaluation systems within their departments.