Whose Math and for What Purpose? A Community Seminar on Identity, Culture, and Mathematics

ABSTRACT

In the spring of 2018, the Pomona College mathematics department hosted a community seminar on identity, culture, and power in the discipline and education of mathematics. The seminar was free and open to all students, faculty, and staff of the college. In this paper, I describe the specifics of the seminar, what types of issues we discussed, what a typical seminar session looked like, and what we all gained from experience. Similar community seminars might support mathematics departments and faculty in their own endeavors to create inclusive and healthy mathematical communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Community building
• culture
• identity
• power
• social justice

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The seminar announcements and posters were created by Amy Oden (PO'18). Special thanks to the Pomona College Mathematics Department coordinator, Kathy Sheldon, and the Pomona College AWM student chapter. The author also wishes to thank the referees and PRIMUS editors, whose probing questions made this paper a lot stronger than it was.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This blog has now been discontinued and remains available as an archive. The editors of the blog have now moved to https://inclusionexclusion.org and continue sharing related new content there.

2 https://www.edgeforwomen.org

3 https://www.mathalliance.org

4 https://mathinstitutes.org/diversity/modern-mathematics-workshop

5 As Gutiérrez also acknowledges, many of these dimensions in turn interact with some of the earlier work already mentioned in this article; consider, for example, how D'Ambrosio's work (and that of other ethnomathematicians) contributes to thinking of mathematics in the context of alternative notions of knowledge.

6 Though we initially intended to have an open space accessible to the broader community, no nonacademic members of the local community participated. (We did have participants from some of the sister colleges within the college consortium our institution belongs to.) Nonetheless we found the overall experience insightful, and the composition of the participants being mainly limited to our own (college and consortium) community meant that we could have more intimate conversations. A community seminar engaging with the local community would certainly open up different opportunities and challenges.

7 The particular ordering of this list of dimensions was due to the ongoing conversations on our campus being mainly focused on these dimensions in this particular order. However, for most audiences, it might make more sense to use an alphabetical order: cultural, ethnic, gender, linguistic, racial. Furthermore, distinct communities might find other noteworthy dimensions they might wish to include.

8 The email seminar announcement went out with this particular list of guiding questions; thus it sent a nod to Rochelle Gutiérrez's work, and a copy of her paper [35] was included in all announcement emails. I describe the particular framework in some detail in Section 2.

9 In fact Issue 4 of Volume 23 of PRIMUS is a special issue on capstone courses; see https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/upri20/23/4.

10 The most visible exception is the standard research seminar. The community seminar is akin to the research seminar, in that it brings together people interested in a topic and engaging in it together. However, in a research seminar, there is often a hierarchy of expertise; in a community seminar, we explicitly aim for a democratic framework, where all participants can see themselves as equally valuable contributors with different types of experiences and expertise.

11 This session was facilitated by a historian of mathematics who started us off with a discussion of a paper about Chinese mathematics and the differences between abstraction and generalization [17]. Though we started with Chinese mathematics however, during the conversation, we did branch out into other cultures and geographies. In particular, here is how the facilitator summarized the session on the seminar wiki: “We discussed how history enters mathematics often in subtle ways through the naming of theorems, definitions, etc. These names overwhelmingly come from Ancient Greek or early to modern Western European tradition (despite the fact that, e.g., Pascal's triangle can be found in ancient Chinese, medieval Indian, medieval Islamic mathematics well before Pascal). How can a more representative history be communicated? Is there space for this in the classroom (bearing in mind the constraints of time and content)?”.

12 The recap here mainly comes from my informal conversations with different participants through the semester and then beyond. I did not do a post-survey, though it would be a good idea to implement one, and I certainly would if I were doing this again. See Section 8.8 for more ideas on assessing a community seminar of this type.

13 I personally ended up working with one such non-major student, who mentored for a first-year seminar I taught at a later semester. Our past experience in the community seminar provided us with the initial connection, and in our ongoing interactions, it was clear to both that we were still using language around and conceptualizations of certain issues we had developed together at the seminar.

14 This is not to imply that the goal is to indoctrinate or to even reach consensus; consensus is often nice but may not always be possible or feasible, or even desirable, depending on context. What I'm getting at here is a healthy, functioning community that can work together toward the common goals set for the seminar.

15 As I mentioned in Footnote 10, this type of feedback was mainly communicated to me in person by the many student and faculty participants.

16 See https://www.msri.org/workshops/1012/schedules.

17 Much has been written about assessment; even in the context of mathematics pedagogy; see the recent article [54], which reviews and contextualizes over eighty PRIMUS articles (and some related special issues) on various dimensions of assessment.

18 This was a collection of articles that arose from three meetings on mathematical cultures held in London.

Additional information

Funding

The Spring 2018 community seminar was partially funded by a faculty grant from the Consortium on High Achievement and Success (CHAS).

Notes on contributors

Gizem Karaali

Gizem Karaali completed her undergraduate studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. After receiving her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California Berkeley, she taught at the University of California Santa Barbara for two years. She is currently a professor of mathematics at Pomona College where she enjoys teaching a wide variety of courses and working with many interesting people. She has most recently been involved with promoting the humanistic aspects of mathematics via her work through the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, and developing and collecting materials for faculty interested in teaching mathematics for social justice. Gizem Karaali is a Sepia Dot (a 2006 Project NExT Fellow).