W&M professors hone mixed-reality training to promote diverse hiring
Jason Chen has been finding uses for avatars for years, and recently found another way they can help humans.
Chen, associate professor of education at William & Mary, is working with Professor of Theatre and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies Francis Tanglao Aguas on a professional development curriculum. The pair is halfway through a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to create the program.
The goal is to design and build a professional development curriculum that is highly adaptable to an individual’s particular institutional context. Chen and Aguas have already developed mixed-reality simulations, and have recruited a sample of 30 diversity fellows from various universities. The fellows will work in teams of three to identify gatekeeping mechanisms that impede the ability of their particular institutions to recruit, retain and include underrepresented faculty and students in the geosciences, according to the grant description for “EAGER: Networking Faculty Seeds for Collective Change in the Geosciences.”
