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Building on a meeting held at Lafayette last spring, Chawne Kimber, associate professor of mathematics, is helping organize the 2007 Mathematics of Social Justice Workshop to be held June 20-23 at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Kimber and Priscilla Bremser, professor of mathematics at Middlebury, have been awarded a grant from the Learn and Serve America Corporation through the Pennsylvania/New York Campus Compact Consortium to host the course development workshop.
“Of course, what we do regularly in teaching college-level mathematics courses is to provide quantitative literacy, albeit on a very high level,” says Kimber. “What this project does is to attempt to teach students both how they may use their quantitative literacy for the good and why basic innumeracy in our citizens is often the result of some social injustice.”
Major workshop goals include broadening the base of college mathematics faculty serving as voices of experience in incorporating social justice questions into their teaching, enlarging and improving upon the set of resources for course development available to mathematics faculty, and planning outreach efforts to bring resources to those who can use them.
“This is a ‘working workshop,’” Kimber explains. “In addition to presentations from math and statistics faculty who already do this sort of teaching, we’ll discuss the incorporation of service-learning into math courses – particularly how to do so in a rural setting – and how best to design a course module. We’ll spend a great deal of time working together to develop a couple of modules before the end of the workshop.”
Rob Root, associate professor and associate head of mathematics, also will participate in the conference. Last spring, Root developed the first mathematics of social justice workshop in which Lafayette hosted 27 professors from around the country. Faculty worked to develop undergraduate general education courses focusing on the connections between political, economic, and cultural issues and mathematical ideas.
In addition to Lafayette, Middlebury, and Campus Compact, support for this year’s workshop is coming from West Chester University, Moravian College, and East Stroudsburg University.
The workshop is open to all mathematics and statistics educators interested in this type of teaching. Additional information and applications can be found on the official workshop announcement page. Applications are due by April 1.
Kimber, who has given presentations throughout the United States, has shared her research in publications such as Algebra Universalis, Czechoslovak Mathematical Journal, and Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo. Kimber taught a Values and Science/Technology course in which students helped low-income Easton residents prepare tax forms. She also participated in the Mathematical Adventures at Lafayette sessions, in which faculty hosted teachers and honors students from Easton Area High School for enrichment workshops.
A past recipient of the Excellence in Diversity Education Award, Kimber earned her Ph.D. from the University of Florida. She is the former faculty adviser of the McKelvy Scholars program and helped establish the Reeder Fellows program. Her academic interests include algebra and topology.