Undergraduate math courses, as traditionally taught, often serve as barriers to entry into many STEM disciplines. In this episode, Aris Winger joins us to discuss strategies that can increase student success and reduce equity gaps in student outcomes in these classes.
Aris is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Gwinnett College. His current areas of interest include equity in mathematics education, culturally responsive teaching, and social justice mathematics. He is a co-author of the book series Advocating for Students of Color in Mathematics and is the Executive Director of the National Association of Mathematicians.
Show Notes
- Pamella E. Harris and Aris Winger. Advocating for Students of Color in Mathematics book series
- Pearson MyMathLab.
- ALEKS
Transcript
John: Undergraduate math courses, as traditionally taught, often serve as barriers to entry into many STEM disciplines. In this episode, we explore strategies that can increase student success and reduce equity gaps in student outcomes in these classes.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guest today is Aris Winger. Aris is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Gwinnett College. His current areas of interest include equity in mathematics education, culturally responsive teaching, and social justice mathematics. He is a co-author of the book series Advocating for Students of Color in Mathematics and is the Executive Director of the National Association of Mathematicians. Welcome Aris.
Aris: Thank you for having me.
John: It’s great to see you again. You were here not too long ago to do some workshops on our campus. Today’s teas are:… Aris, are you drinking any tea?
Aris: Oh, I am not drinking tea. I’m drinking water. Yeah, my family is a big tea drinking family, but I’m just a water drinker.
Rebecca: That’s okay, water is the foundation of tea.
Aris: Yeah, that’s right. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: I’m drinking Blue Sapphire today, John.
John: Back to an old favorite.
Rebecca: It is, yeah.
John: And I am drinking Lady Grey.
Rebecca: Oh, nice, I had that not too long ago.
Aris: Excellent.
Rebecca: So in most colleges and universities, passing rates in math classes are lower than most other disciplines, and we’ve invited you here today to discuss strategies that would allow more students to be successful in the study of math. First, though, can you tell us a little bit about your own educational journey?
Aris: So yes, I was valued in math from my earliest mathematical memory, and so my earliest mathematical memory was with my mother, who was showing me the future. I remember going up to her and, like, “Mom, look, two plus three is five.” She was like, “soon you’ll notice that two and she put an x 3 is six.” I was like, “What’s that?” She’s like, “You’ll see.” And then from there, like, early on, I was doing two-digit multiplications faster than other people. And then the teachers around me were like, “Oh, you’re good, you’re fast, you can do this.” And so I say, “Oh, I guess I can.” And so I started to develop sort of a math identity. That is to say that it became part of me to be, quote, good at math. And I kept that for a long time. And when life got rough for me, when I was younger, I could always go to math and be safe at math, because I felt an identity. I felt good there, I felt valuable in mathematics. And so it just became a deep part of my identity. So that meant that I was going to major in math. That meant that I was going to be a mathematics professor the whole nine. So I continue to go back and look at that story to see my through line. And I’ve had to change the story, by the way. It used to be, in this journey that I’ve had, I’ve had to change the story also, because the story used to be, “Oh, I’m just smarter than other people,” when, in fact, the story really was that I’ve been trained. And really making this understanding that not that drinking the Kool Aid, that somehow I’m ordained to have a mathematical brain, I’ve been trained, and I deserve to say that I was trained, because I put in a lot of work. And so if a surgeon can say they were trained, a mathematician can say that they were trained also, and so for 10 years, from 1995 to 2005 I got a bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in mathematics. That 10 years was training.
John: A very large share of students that we see in college say “I’ve never been good at math”. Why do so many students come in struggling with math or believing that they’re not capable of being successful in math?
Aris: Yeah, well, it’s because they’ve had mathematical experiences that weren’t optimal for them. And so there’s a narrative that I want to interrogate, and I’m thankful for this opportunity to speak out, an interrogation of a narrative that we have to call into question. And so it is this notion that somehow math has done something to us and math has done nothing to us. So when someone says that they hate math, they’re not talking about the body of knowledge that’s the greatest body of knowledge in history of the human experience. They’re not talking about that. They’re talking about a human relational experience they’ve had in the culture of mathematics that humans have built about how we do math, particularly in the western context. And so whenever someone today says, “Oh, I hate math,” then I just say, lots of my colleagues say, “Oh, I’m sorry that happened to you.” I just say, “Who was it? What grade? Tell me what happened.” And then often they will say, “Oh, it’s this person, here’s what they said to me,” or “here’s why I didn’t like this class.” Lots of times they also say it was when the letter showed up. And so for me, what helps me is that I try to return to the innocence of the person that is talking to me. So when someone says that, I’m thinking about a kid sitting in the chair and then all of a sudden, they’ve been doing percentages, they’ve been doing proportions, and then all of a sudden someone writes an X up on the board and says, I want to know what X is. And for some reason, it blows this person away, like I have no idea what’s going on. And that person starts to, maybe for the first time, feel unsure, feel like they don’t belong. Now, there are all these feelings that are showing up that never got attended to. And we know in this discipline, the way that it is taught, that that cascades, because then this builds on the next thing, which builds on the next thing, and then all of a sudden you find yourself, “Whoa, I gotta get out of this thing.” Now, the tragedy that we have in our society is that we have lots and lots of our young people who are getting out of the discipline of mathematics, and it’s the most important, [LAUGHTER] right? And so that’s the tragedy, that’s the crisis, that we have so many people leaving our discipline. And so I want to be clear, that doesn’t mean that everyone needs to be a math major. That means that the world that I dream of is one in which we’re all connected and thriving quantitatively. What does that mean? That means that we are allowing ourselves, or we have the permission, to ask quantitative questions like, “Why does that cost that much?” and “is that the right percentage rate for my mortgage?” and “why don’t I want that payday loan?” Right now we have so many silent people quantitatively, because the predominant space in which we think quantitatively is in school, and so in school, school mathematics, systematically, is about some other narratives that we continue to uphold, like speed and correctness, and it doesn’t allow for the imagination to grow. So the answer to your question is that these experiences, when we see the people today in our colleges, they are, in terms of math, they are an extension of a past experience that is over a decade long. And so I want to return all of our kids back to that, in a sense, to “Wait, you know, you’ve had a math experience that has been difficult.” And for me, one of my goals is to create a new narrative for those people who come into my class, and not just for them. And so if I can get a young person or old person, whoever’s in my class, to think differently about math, then maybe they get their cousin to think differently about math and their little sister. And because, again, you never know who’s watching and who’s going to see how you interact and how that impacts them.
Rebecca: You’ve talked about our individual experiences with math and how much they vary, and they vary across elementary and secondary school districts as well. What can college math instructors do to help address these inequities in prior knowledge?
Aris: The first thing I would think of is that each college instructor needs to look at each of their people as an individual. And so for me, for so long, I would go to my pre-calculus class or college algebra and say, “Okay, I’m teaching that group,” and that was 11 years ago. And today I go in and I’m saying, “Oh, I’ve got Sammy, I’ve got Mark, I’ve got Jamal, I’ve got Lisa, I’ve got Tiana, right? I’ve got this group of people, and I’m teaching this subject today. Given who I have in my class, what should I be doing today? And how should I do it today?” And so there is a returning, or perhaps introducing, for the first time, a humanity of the people who are in my class. And so that’s the first thing. Just acknowledge that you’re teaching a group of human individuals Now, from there, there’s an acknowledgement that you yourself come from a culture, come from an experience, and that that’s going to impact the way that you teach. And so then, now, at this point, how is it that we can develop a good relationship between yourself and the people who you’re going to be engaging with for the next 14, 15, 16, weeks in this discipline, and then thinking about also this balance between your relationship with those people and the content, and which one comes first. And so for so long, it’s like, “Oh, I gotta get through this. I gotta get through this. I gotta get through this topic, this topic, this topic, this topic.” And the thing that keeps me up at night is that, in our discipline, there’s a crucial question that’s lacking in our discipline still, and it is the question I think we have to ask ourselves, is, “How do my students feel?” Somehow, the question of how my students feel when I give back assignment and it’s marked up with red, or if Pearson MyMathLab says that, “No, that’s incorrect,” and they’ve been working on it, or if they’re in ALEKS and they’ve been working on a topic for 35 minutes, and ALEKS says, “You know what, I think you should move on.” How that makes them feel? Or maybe a policy that I have of no late homework, even though they have two jobs, all of that. How is it that what I do in a space where I have all the control, how does it make my students feel? And then to rectify that with how I want them to feel learning the greatest discipline in the history. Now we know how I want them to feel. I want them to feel curious. I want them to feel empowered. I hold knowledge that I’m trying to convey and explore, for them to be super powerful, super engaged and literate quantitatively. And so I want all these positive emotions, and yet all these negative emotions are happening. And so part of my job as a professional, I see, is to try and ease that tension, to have them try and learn it, but also for them to feel joy, to feel curiosity, to feel great about themselves, right? And so I was at the joint math meetings, and I was giving a talk, and at the end, I was talking about feedback forms, that you’ve got to get feedback from your students in order to understand what’s going on with them, because you don’t understand what’s going down, that was the bold claim I was making as a teacher. A person in the audience at the end said “I wanted to push back.” Now I love pushback, because lots of great things come out of pushback, just like I want to push back. And I was like, “Okay, great.” And then he says, well, sometimes you shouldn’t listen to their feedback, because I had a student, and we were in class, it was a class of five, and we went through the whole semester, and I could tell they hated the entire experience, but then they came up to me a semester after this semester, came up to me and said, “I hated every moment of your class, but I learned all the material.” And then he said, “that’s the reason why we should ignore our students’ feedback.” And then I responded to him. But then afterwards, after the talk was over, I went out, and he pulled me aside. It’s like, “See I did my job.” And I said, “But wait, so this person got all the content from you, but this person hated every moment in this class, and you think you did your job,” and to anybody who’s listening, that if students got all the content but hated every moment of it, then we haven’t done our job. And that, I want to imagine us doing mathematics and them getting content in connection to the greatest discipline and being who they are, loving every moment. And that’s the dream, and that’s hard, because when you get back a C minus, how can we have someone have joy and get a C minus? And these are hard questions. I don’t claim to have the answers to these, but again, this is tension, but we have to continue to dream, because we have in our hands, we have in our expertise, this great discipline that we have to continue to pass on to people, but pass on to people in joyous ways.
John: Given the diversity in what students come into our class knowing, though, it’s hard to come up with a method of instruction that provides sufficient support for all students while still helping them learn more. How can you build that…
Aris: No, no, what you just said is false. Now, it might be true that we have not been able to do it yet. So what you just said, I respectfully disagree. I think that what you said is true if we continue to do what we’ve been doing, there’s no doubt about that. And so that’s what I mean about dreaming. And so I’ve come on to this podcast to dream with you. And so when you dream, you can’t say stuff like that, because then there’s no openness to be like, “Okay, wait, how can we do something else?” I agree with you that if we keep doing what we’re doing, then… and so let’s unpack that. That means that I go in front of somebody, I go in front of a class, and this happens to all of us. It’s a great problem. You go in front of the class and mathematics, the way it is built now, says that, “Oh, you must have prerequisite knowledge.” And so that means that we think of math in school as a body of knowledge, more than a natural human activity. And this tension, we have to make sure we elucidate and make clear that we can think of math as a body of knowledge, or we can think of it as a place where people get to play. Now, in one of those with the natural human activity, everybody just needs to come, explore, think about mathematic questions. This is the math circles space where you just play. You make it an introductory question, and it’s set up so that there are multiple entry points, and you just go after it, and then you have someone who’s facilitating, who’s valuing every single contribution. Notice I didn’t say answer, every single contribution. Or you can think of our discipline as this compendium of knowledge, where, over the last, however, many centuries since the dawn of humanity, we’ve been collecting all of these mathematical facts into one big thing that, again, is the biggest dossier of human knowledge that humans have. But if you think about it that way, exclusively, then when you come into pre-calculus, then when I look at you, then I’m thinking, “Do you know enough college algebra?” And if I do that, then I’m being exclusionary from the jump. The first day of class, we’re being exclusionary subconsciously, to all of our students, to some of them, right?
John: You interrupted me in the middle of the question. The next part I was going to ask, I think, would get to the points that you’re making, that we want all of our students to be successful in developing their knowledge, but given their differences in backgrounds, what are some strategies we can use, perhaps to leverage peers in class, or in other ways, to help provide that sort of support for all of our students, no matter where their starting point is?
Aris: I think that’s a great question, and it’s true that given if–then statement, if the if I call in the question, I will not hear the then. So yeah, that’s why I interrupted you. So what we have to do is, again, we have to change the narrative of what a teacher thinks. And so now, and I’m about to get into trouble, stepping all the way back, the challenge with our students in mathematics is really a challenge with our professors. And so this means that there are lots of us who are superbly comfortable, who have lifetime jobs with tenure, who have been successful in quotes. What does that mean? That the way they think about success has been, “Oh, I’ve had five to 10 students come back and say, ‘That was a great experience. I have students who are going to graduate school. I have students who are doing research.’” And so the revelation for me was, wait, I’ve had hundreds of students, and I’ve gotten dozens of feedback, [LAUGHTER] and I’m using the dozens of people… like you only hear from the people who are doing great, because the people who don’t like you aren’t going to tell you to your face, right? And so I’ve had biased feedback and like, “Well, wait, what happened to this person, this person, this person, the person I don’t even remember, was I really serving them?” And I actually don’t know the answer to that. And so there’s something about each of us as professors completely being rigorous about how we teach and critical of the way we teach, so that we continue to use new methods. And so this is happening in our discipline, where lots and lots of people are now doing active learning, lots and lots of people are doing less lecture. And so this is not a critique on lecture. It might be a critique on lecture with five people, or it might be a critique on lecture with 300 people. But again, like if you’re lecturing to 300 people for however long, how do our students feel? Later today, I’m doing some stuff with Math for America, and last year, when I did some stuff with them, I had a person and I’m gonna ask whether this is similar for them tonight, who has 35 students in 45 minutes, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And that person has said, “Well, I can’t do anything but lecture, I’ve got to get the content out.” And this is in the context, of course, in K through 12, where you might have your state forcing you to make sure you do well in the course tests. And so they’re under so much pressure. But again, as we imagine, I’ve seen people do active learning with 35 people in 45 minutes, and so that’s something that you just have to try. So the first thing I want to say is that, what have you been doing? Have you gotten the feedback that it’s working? What are the grades look like in this system and continue to try new things. And so you’re not going to do stuff overnight. The thing that I don’t want to see is that you’re doing the same thing you’ve been doing the last 25 years. That we can’t have. And so I am making a call of action to our professoriate to try something new, be bold, and what better time to do it is when you can’t be fired. We have a lot of anti-tenured, tenured people, in the sense that a big part of the point of getting tenure is to then explore, say what you feel, to not be put in a box. And then that’s sometimes when we become the most conservative. I do want to shout out, though, our lecturers and vital faculty, the visiting, the instructors, the tenure track, the assistant professors, and so forth, that are also thinking about these things, who don’t have the job security, who may not have the ability to be creative in the classroom also, because then they might be judged for it, or say, you know, “You can’t do it that way and don’t have that job security, also.”
Rebecca: As someone outside of mathematics, it seems to me like there’s a role for faculty in other disciplines to play here as well, because there’s a lot of fear mongering around math, I think, from other disciplines and things, maybe from their own mathematical experiences. But I know, as a designer, I’m constantly helping students try to find some relevance to the math so they’re not so scared of it, because I think it’s really important for their work in just about every discipline.
Aris: Yeah, I think there’s a big disconnect between mathematics and all the other disciplines. And again, to your point, I think it’s because everyone has their own walk with mathematics, and oftentimes it’s not a positive. So that means sometimes we get advisors outside of math who are saying, “Oh no, no, don’t take that. You don’t need that extra math class.” Or we get people who are just like, “Well, let’s just get you through math as quickly as possible,” or whatever. For me, that just means we need to be having more conversations like, “What does it look like?” I’m dreaming again. What does it look like for a designer to sit down with a math professor, or the two departments to sit and talk together and say, “Okay, well, what do you want mathematically for our students? What do you want design-wise, for our students? How do these things intersect?” And so we’ve been in a silo, mathematicians for a while. People just leave us alone. And now we see what’s happening. Math departments are closing. People are losing majors because now we thought that we could just do our own thing, serve, have our majors, but now people are really starting to ask the question, “Well, wait, the way that you’re teaching. It doesn’t feel like it’s so relevant.” For too long, we’ve asked, “Well, how am I supposed to use the quadratic equation in real life?” And actually, I don’t think we properly responded to that, because I think the proper response is that, “Oh, solving the quadratic equation is useful in cognitive agility in this way, this way, this way. And in addition to that, you’re right, [LAUGHTER] right?” Yeah, that like “Doing this exercise is helpful in these ways, and you probably won’t see it in the future.” And so that’s why we made quantitative reasoning, that’s why we have these other courses. But that took us a very long time to do that, to actually respond to people, like my school didn’t even have a quantitative reasoning class until finally, we looked at all the DFW rates and it was just like, “Well, we have to do something else.” Now, what happened there was this movement from college algebra to college algebra and quantitative reasoning didn’t have to happen, but it was a “Wait, we’re not moving on college algebra. At some point we think college algebra has to be this. And therefore, if you want these people to succeed, then we have to create this whole other space for them.” Again, as I dream, I would imagine that mathematicians as teachers would say, “Well, wait, maybe we could teach it differently,” but we didn’t do that. But I think lots of times, mathematicians and math faculty are movable objects like “No, it has to be taught this way.” And then very few people outside the discipline can come up to it and say, “Well, no, can’t you change?” And them saying, “You can’t change, because it has to be like this. We’re the experts.” But when I also think about other disciplines, I get jealous. Yeah. I mean, because, like, other disciplines get to talk about the great ideas and the systems that I’m in that I see we don’t get to talk about the great ideas. The notion of infinity is one of the great ideas that mathematics brings to the world. And so when I think about Calculus II and sequences and series, and people are going to start to groan when they listen to this, that we fail to see that we’re talking about how infinity operates, one of the many ways that infinity operates, and it’s an absolutely brilliant idea that very few people talk about because we’re too busy talking about ratio tests, and then you just get bogged down in what tests are we using, or does this have a limit? And you just forget that the notion of adding up an infinite list and getting a finite number is like so unbelievably profound. But political science gets to talk about justice, U.S. history gets to talk about the Constitution, and philosophy gets to talk about God, and over here, we have just as deep things, but we’re so tied up in procedures and making sure that you have the right minus sign. Do you see the difference that I’m bringing up? That in literature, people get to read Toni Morrison, and I’m not saying that I’m jealous that they have better things. I’m saying we have just as good things. But why is it that we are bogged down in this minutia, but they’re not critiquing Toni Morrison’s grammar. They’re just reading Toni Morrison and becoming better humans. Where is the becoming better humans in Calc I, where’s the becoming better humans in algebra? And that’s the open space that I dream of in our classes.
John: I’m hoping going forward, that we will still see students studying the Constitution in history classes. [LAUGHTER]
Aris: That’s right.
John: That may be changing in the current environment. [LAUGHTER]
Aris: I shouldn;t be laughing.. I don’t want to laugh, but I also don’t want to cry. That’s right. [LAUGHTER]
John: Sometimes we have to.
Aris: That’s right.
John: But as you’ve noted, students often come in with this fixed mindset, and they often have not had that much success in their experiences before they get to us. Should there be, perhaps, more effort in society to transform K-12 math instruction so that we don’t lose so many people from a discipline that’s so important?
Aris: I agree with that, and I think we also have to be careful. So I have no time for figure pointing, because what I’ve seen when I do professional developments all the way K through 50, whatever it is, right? As I just go, yeah, that I always see the pointing back. And so when you go to the ninth grade, it’s like, well, eighth grade, and then eighth grade it’s like, well, it’s Elementary, and then Elementary, it’s like, well, it’s the parents, and then it’s like, it’s the reverse induction, right? You just go back, well, then maybe we shouldn’t have kids at all, right? …if you want to just keep doing that. And so I think we’re all in this. And so there are two things, you come to a young person, you come to a student who’s had a bad math experience, and they’re a sophomore, and it’s the first day of class, and so you know they’ve had a bad math experience, and so you can’t send them back into K-12. They can’t go back. And so we can say, “Oh, this might be… and I have said this earlier, that this is a response of a bad math experience they had earlier.” And yes, we need to fix that. But this person’s in front of me today, and so I don’t want us to be confused that, “Oh, that this person is a lost cause.” The responsibilities on me now to create a better mathematical experience for this person and to help them as much as reasonable, and we can need to, as we were saying earlier, have conversations with K through 12. So what are real, fundamental conversations between math faculty and K through 12 faculty. And so what’s nice particularly about Oswego is that you all have the opportunity to make real connections to the K through 12 places, to schools that may feed into Oswego, and sit down with the faculty and say, “Oh, what’s happening?” I’ve seen this happen out west at Sonoma State, where they have relationships with K through 12 schools, and they’re having those types of conversations. Now, those conversations aren’t easy, because there’s status that you have to disrupt about in the space and that you just have to deal with, but once you break that stuff down, become one in community, then you can start to have real conversations about, “Oh, wait, you’re teaching this, but we’re teaching this. And so when did they end up learning this? And oh, do you really have to teach that?” Yeah, and you just have good conversations.
Rebecca: As we’ve been talking today, was thinking about an early experience I had in my teaching career where my previous institution I was invited as the non-math faculty member to join an assessment retreat and spent an entire week out of town with the math faculty, who I really didn’t know very well, and we had a great time, and found all kinds of connections between our disciplines. And for me, I think that was a really important opportunity. So I thought it was a really wonderful opportunity to collaborate across disciplines and to get a better understanding of what the faculty in that department were doing, what some of their objectives were, but also I shared what some of the art and design students, some of the struggles that they have, and I thought it was a really rewarding opportunity, and I actually had forgotten about it until this conversation. [LAUGHTER]
Aris: That is fantastic. That’s fantastic.
Rebecca: But it sounds right along the lines of what you’re advocating for as a way to share and disrupt and move things forward.
Aris: Absolutely, absolutely.
John: From society’s perspective, the rate of return to higher education, despite the popular perception, is pretty much at the highest we’ve ever seen, and that’s especially true in STEM fields. And yet, students of color, though, have been seriously underrepresented in STEM fields, perhaps partly because of underrepresentation in faculty and in their prior interactions. What strategies could be used to help reduce some of those inequities in terms of the mix of students who are entering into STEM fields?
Aris: Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of things. So this is an individual and a systemic issue. So individually, I think you have to go all the way back and say, “Well, what does it mean to be of color? What does it mean to be a student of color? What does it mean to be a person of color?” And again, the challenge is that people don’t even want to ask that question. Like, student of color or person of color, came into the vernacular at some point, and we just didn’t stop and say, “Well, wait, what does that mean?” And so when I say that I am black in the United States of America, people who are listening, what does that mean to you? If you’re listening to this five weeks from when we record and I say that I’m black, what does that mean to you? What do you think that means to me? Now I want to be clear. The reason why I ask is because when Lakeisha comes to your class, and Lakeisha is a young black woman, and you haven’t even thought about what it means to be black, then are you going to try and convince me that you’re prepared to teach Lakeisha? Do I want my daughter in your class? And the reason why I bring this up is because it means everything to me to be black, it means everything to me, and you haven’t even thought about what it is. So now I’m coming to your classroom, and there’s something fundamentally important to me, and I look at you and I already know the signs that it doesn’t mean anything to you. And so then you are already positioned to me as someone who doesn’t even care about me. And now let me step all the way back. Everybody’s nice, everybody’s a good person. Everybody’s loves their family, loves the country. Everybody’s nice, nice, nice, nice. I’m not talking about nice. I’m talking about love, actually. I’m talking about realizing the nature of the place in which we live, the United States of America, which is again a place of ultimate brilliance, but a place that also has had significant struggles, tragedy and terrorism amongst people of color and black people in particular, right? We can be both, brilliant and have terroristic backgrounds. And so for me, that’s the first thing on an individual level when we think about again, when I said earlier that we have to think about our students individually, that is tied to, “Wait, that person is black in America, that might mean A, B, C, D, and E.” Now it could mean that. It might not mean that, but sociology is a thing. Sociology is real, and the studies show that, about marginalization, how people feel. Stereotype threat, microaggressions, those things are real things. And so that means, again, we need to be educated about what that might mean. But let me take 17 seconds… that for me to be black means two things at least. It means that, again, I come from a miraculous people. I come from a group of people who have been terrorized and stigmatized for centuries in this country, and somehow, our most profound voices, our most powerful voices, are ones that are trying to teach love and justice for everybody. That’s a miracle, like somehow, like in the face of all of that ugliness, our leaders come out talking about love and justice for every single individual. Being black also means that I’m part of a social constructed category where I am not getting things that other people are getting because of skin color, and that’s personally, and that means systemically. And so both of those things are happening, are a part of who you see in me. But what that means is, when you look at someone else who is of color, then you might say, “Oh, that person’s walking around in this society, and they might be experiencing stuff just because of the color of their skin.” And again, coming back to that fundamental question, “How might that make them feel? How might they be struggling today to learn some of the stuff that I’m saying.” And most importantly, how is it that in these four walls for this hour and 15 minutes, in a space that I fully control, how is it that I can make this space different, different from what the rest of the world has told them their whole life? So that’s the personal one. Now, systemically, I’ve been thinking a lot about mentorship, and so if we have 17 students of color, 17 marginalized students in whatever category, whether it’s women in STEM also, 17 students at my institution who are part of a category, a social category, they might be black, they might be whatever, then the question for me becomes, how is it that we get them the right mentors, and that means that focused attention by someone who is ahead of them on the road for their goals, someone who is going to sit with them and look in their eyes and have them convinced that, at least for that hour of that meeting, that no one else in the world as important as they are to that person, someone who is going to awaken something within them, all potential that they didn’t even realize they had. And so when you have good mentors, then you provide pathways for people that they didn’t even think were possible. Now, of course, the challenge is, how is it that we need to train good mentors? We need to get them out there. Right now, we are not trained to be good mentors, particularly across identities, particularly across racial identities and cultural backgrounds. And so my immediate hope is that we would get mentors to people about what it means to be a STEM professional, because what mentorship also does is it gives people who are trying to get into STEM, STEM identities. It opens the doors for them to be like, “Oh, I can do this.” For 25 years, I’ve heard young people say, I saw this person, I interacted with this person, and I realized that I can do this, particularly when Ketanji became a Supreme Court justice. I just remember the very next day, a 16-year old black girl said, “Now that this has happened, a whole world has opened up for me.” I just want that to sit with the listener, that this person will never meet Ketanji. They simply need to just see her become a Supreme Court justice, and now a whole world is opened up for them. Now that’s just from 1000s of miles away. If we can somehow get mentors to each of our young people who are trying to do this, then it gives them, like this personal connection too. It makes it even powerful.
Rebecca: Some of the change that you’re talking about, the dreams that we’re dreaming together, definitely are some of the long game… [LAUGHTER]
Aris: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Yes, yes, yes.
Rebecca: What are some of the short game moves that we can make to get to that longer game?
Aris: Yeah, so then I think it depends on who I’m talking to. So then if I’m talking to someone who’s seasoned, who’s comfortable, who is going about their life, and it’s easy, again, as we said before, I want you to say, “Well, I want to do something bold and different.” And again, I guess the first thing I would say to you is, “I want you to send your students the feedback.” We can do this in multiple ways. I want you to have some real conversations with and get some real feedback from your students about how things are going with you and whether you are doing your due diligence and uplifting people in the discipline of math. If you are new or you have little power or you’re just moving up the ranks, there’s something about also looking at your practices, but being able to get a critical mass, like just joining other people. I think this is true for the older faculty too, but just joining communities and listening to how other people teach and how other people operate in their craft, they continue to just be educated. So again, that’s on the individual level. On the systemic level, I’m looking at our leaders. So then I’m talking to department heads. I’m talking to deans and to presidents and provosts about doing more than just not rocking the boat. And so when we have young people, when we have these disparities in STEM across racial lines, that’s on you, leader. So I’m really trying to push leaders to just say, “Okay, wait, not under my watch.” 17 years from now, I want you to be able to say, “Maybe things have not change, but here are the three things that I tried and they failed, and even in the failure here the 15 things we learned,” that the too many leaders who would just come into position and just try to keep things still and when in fact, your job may be to shake things up so that more people can thrive. So I just met so many leaders that have just been like, “Let me just come and steer the boat,” when, in fact, you may need a whole new boat. You may need to be on a new river. Yeah, so I’ll say that, in that delineation, I mean on the individual level, you’ve got younger faculty, older faculty, and then they might be doing things, but then at the systemic level, our leaders need more courage. They just need more courage. And so the challenge that I have, and it goes back to what we said earlier, is that in order to get courage, you have to be compelled. There has to be a compelling reason for a leader to say, “You know what, I’m going to do the thing, and y’all are not going to like me. We’re going to make classes unified at the 1000 level for math, because this is what our students deserve. And I don’t care what you think about, because the data says that having classes that are completely different from professor to professor makes students suffer, and therefore we must unify. Let’s get to work on it together. And if you don’t like it, okay, we can talk about that too, but this is what we’re doing.” And so that person who does that is compelled by the suffering of our students. The lack of access for our students is the driving factor. There must be something that compels leaders to change, otherwise they won’t.
Rebecca: I wanted to follow up on the feedback forms because you’ve mentioned that throughout our conversation today, and for someone who’s like, “Yes, I will do this,” what would be in said feedback form?
Aris: Oh, thank you for saying that. It would be questions that if they got the answers to, it would shake them and make them really uncomfortable. The thing that I want to say, that I should have said from the beginning, is that it’s comfortable or outstanding, you only get to be one. It’s comfortable or outstanding, you only get to be one of those. And so when I created my feedback forms, and I started filling them, and I started putting in the questions, like, oh, wait, if I actually heard the real answer to this, I’m not going to feel good. And then part of me said, Well, that means it needs to go on there. And so what does that look like? That means like, “Am I doing a good job? Am I giving you everything you need? What do you want me to change?” That one’s not so bad, but it’s just like, “Did I say anything that bothered you? How is my language?” It’s just stuff that like, are you having good time, right? So that’s about me, and so how can I just be better? But then the thing that was transformational for me is when you ask anonymously, people about their lives, and just say, “What’s your biggest challenge today? What are you going through right now? What excites you the most? What do you do when you’re not in school?” So feedback forms do so much if you are authentically digging into them and asking questions that might push you out of your comfort zone, because it’ll change you forever. Because when someone says that all your math problems are binary in terms of gender, and it leaves me out, then it changes the way that I teach forever. Forever. One sentence changes the way I teach forever. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s tons of feedback forms out there, so you can go and investigate those. But for me, it’s “Okay. How am I doing?” And “Who are you as a person?” I have colleagues who give them out after tests also who have, like, logistical and utilitarian reasons for giving them out. But for me, as you might imagine from what I’ve said so far, I’m trying to figure out, am I doing a good job in humanizing you, and who are you as a human.
John: Is this something perhaps that people should do at the start of the semester, just to gather some information about who the students are in the class as well as during the class?
Aris: Yeah, you’re giving them out a lot. Yeah.
John: And you mentioned anonymity. I’ve gone back and forth on that in terms of gathering information about students. Students are likely to be more open when the forms are anonymous. On the other hand, if there’s specific concerns for specific students, there’s some benefit of knowing who the students are. And I’ve sometimes done a mix of those things, where I’ve had some things which were just anonymous and others where students let me know at the beginning of the term, in particular, if they have any special concerns or needs or any challenges they faced in classes in the past.
Aris: I appreciate that, yeah. And so I definitel moved the anonymous route. And then I will say that some of you wrote some things that I think you and I need to talk about personally, and I hope you know who you are, and say, yeah. And then I don’t know if I get any more specific than that, because of anonymity reasons, but yeah, so I try to open the door that way. But yeah, I like your idea of mixing them for sure.
Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?
Aris: Oh, just the same old, same old. And that’s enough, [LAUGHTER] right? So, yeah, I wake up every morning with a mission, and I’m thankful for that. I’m overwhelmed by that, that I am trying to serve people. And first, it starts with my own daughter, my wife, and then I get to then interact with people who are trying to change their lives forever. When you’re in college, when you’re in the educational process, when I’m teaching in K through 12, those young people in particular don’t have the vision yet to understand the path that they’re on. But in particular college, even though some of those people have been forced to go to college, they are there and they’re trying to change the trajectory of their whole life, and to play a role in that is a gift, and I have to treat that with care. And so I wake up every morning just trying to figure out how in the world can I help that person on their educational journey. And that’s all I want to do. And so I’m in a sweet spot where I can do that every day and make a living. So I’m superbly thankful for that. So for me, in general, I’m always trying to make quantitative spaces better for everybody, because better quantitative spaces lead to better quality of lives. And so across so many different levels, if you see me, I’m either with my family, or I’m playing pickleball, or I’m trying to make quantitative spaces better for people for better quality of lives.
Rebecca: …sounds like a good balance.
Aris: Yeah, that’s right. [LAUGHTER] That’s right.
John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you again. And again, we really enjoyed your work here back in January during your visit.
Aris: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.
Rebecca: Thank you so much for your thought-provoking ideas.
Aris: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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