Community, Collaboration, and Climate

Abstract

The Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Pomona College has long worked to create an inclusive and welcoming space for all individuals to study mathematics. Many years ago, our approach to the lack of diversity we saw in our majors was remediation through programming, which sought to ameliorate student deficits. More recently, however, we have taken an anti-deficit approach with focus on changes to the department itself. The programs we have implemented are described below as enhancing community, collaboration, and climate within our department.

Keywords:

• Anti-deficit
• diversity
• equity
• and inclusion
• access

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Our colleague Erica Flapan's Problem Solving for the Sciences – a course organized around doing non-calculus “word problems” – and the second author's Approximately Calculus – later turned into a book – were attempts in this direction.

2 Thirty years ago, at Pomona, if you wanted to do math, you took three semesters of calculus followed by two semesters of a combined linear algebra/differential equations class before you had any choice of topics or classes.

3 Our colleague Ami Radunskaya had worked directly with Uri Treisman, the second author was Pomona's inaugural Posse faculty mentor, and the first author has advised a Posse cohort also.

4 https://www.pomona.edu/administration/draper-center/pays

5 The second author was the lead author of the institutional grant from the Irvine Foundation that started the program.

6 https://ehgoins.wixsite.com/prime

7 https://www.edgeforwomen.org/

8 A top research institution that has been redacted for privacy reasons.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johanna Hardin

Jo Hardin is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Pomona College. She collaborates with molecular biologists to create novel statistical methods for analyzing high throughput data. She has also worked extensively in statistics and data science education, facilitating more modern curricula for higher education instructors. She was a co-author on the 2014 ASA Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Statistical Science, and she writes on the blog https://teachdatascience.com/. She has co-authored “Introduction to Modern Statistics,” a fully open access and free introductory statistics textbook. She has won the Mathematical Association of America's Hogg Award for Excellence in Teaching Introductory Statistics and the Mu Sigma Ro Warde Statistics Education Award. Her favorite part of her job is collaborating with undergraduate students, particularly on student research projects. When she isn't teaching or doing research, she can often be found working with student groups, including Chicago Pomona Posse 13 and Pomona Scholars of Mathematics. In her spare time, she loves trail running.

Shahriar Shahriari

Shahriar Shahriari is the William Polk Russel Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College. He has won the Mathematical Association of America's Haimo Award for Distinguished Teaching in Mathematics and Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for expository writing, American Library Association's Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2007 for his book “Approximately Calculus,” as well as Claremont Colleges' faculty diversity award for mentoring. Shahriari's research is in Combinatorics and his classes are known for encouraging student-driven discovery. In addition to Approximately Calculus (AMS, 2006) he has published the material from his classes in two other texts: Algebra in Action (AMS, 2017) and An Invitation to Combinatorics (Cambridge UP, 2021). Shahriari was the inaugural Posse mentor at Pomona College, and helped start both Pomona College's PAYS program and the mathematics department's Pomona Scholars of Mathematics.