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During the last week of May, 27 professors from colleges and universities across the country attended Lafayette’s Mathematics of Social Justice Course Development Workshop. For the rest of summer break, the attendees will be taking what they learned and applying that knowledge toward next semester’s courses and beyond.
The workshop, which was developed by Robert Root, associate professor of mathematics, is two-fold. The first part was the actual conference May 23-25, which worked to help faculty develop undergraduate general education courses focusing on the connections between political, economic, and cultural issues and mathematical ideas.
The second portion consists of an intellectual community of sorts. Conference attendees will communicate through email and a blog while working on materials for classes they will teach in the fall. The process will culminate with another conference after the 2006-07 academic year to present the results of the offerings.
Root said the conference was tremendously successful, yielding more than double the amount of participants he expected. Professors came from institutions of all sizes and locations including: Duke University, Middlebury College, Occidental College, East Stroudsburg University, Lehigh University, the United States Military Academy, Wheaton College, Columbia University, and University of Vermont.
“The workshop ended up being a much bigger undertaking than I had expected going into it,” says Root. “There is much more interest in the topic than I anticipated.”
The conference dealt with many issues relating math to social justice. Topics such as fair division of resources and voting methods are examples of this connection.
“There is another thread that ties mathematics to justice,” says Root. “That is in our own understanding of math and the way we use it every day. We go car shopping and the salesman offers us a special deal on the financing; is the deal good for us? What about the maintenance plan that we are offered when we buy a new appliance? If we expect to be treated fairly by society, we need to be prepared to use our education in mathematics to make decisions and negotiate.”
Since the ultimate goal of the conference is creating new courses, there were also presentations on writing, putting together a curriculum module, service learning, and ways to implement an innovative course.
Conference presenters included Victor Donnay, professor of mathematics at Bryn Mawr College; Bonnie Winfield, director of the Landis Community Outreach Center; John Meier, professor of mathematics; Bianca Falbo, assistant professor of English; and Larry Lesser, professor of mathematical sciences at University of Texas, El Paso.
Currently there are nine different groups of professors working on various aspects of the modules such as identifying sources, preparing reading and homework assignments, and writing lectures.
“Many of the participants are creating modules that can be inserted into a math or statistics class that they already teach, but others, like me, are preparing a full-blown course on the topic,” says Root.
By the end of July, preliminary materials will be collected and shared among members of the community. The success and evolution of the various classes will then be documented along with bibliographies, syllabi, and class activities and presented next year. DePaul University in Chicago has tentatively agreed to host that conference, depending on the availability of funding.
Char Gray, executive director of Pennsylvania Campus Compact, is in the process of writing a grant application to support the conference and other related work.
“As far as I can tell, this workshop was the first ever on this theme,” says Root. “But the groundswell of interest that it generated strongly suggests that it won’t be the last.”