Blogging from The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics

Prof Deborah King – University of Melbourne.

Live blogging: Note that these are notes I’ve taken live, but will edit this today into a more readable format. I want to put this up straight away though to see if I have any obvious misunderstanding. Equations will also be put into more readable format ASAP.

Prof King is the Coordinator of Learning and Teaching Innovation at Melbourne University

Talking about mathematics educators rather than education – interested in people – community and collaboration.

Talking about the personal perspective of an accidental teacher (Prof King as a personal story).

Background of Prof King

First in family to finish high school. Family thought she was nuts to continue in education. Definitely didn’t want to be a teacher and left uni.

Returned as a mature student in a mathematics department that valued teaching over research and started tutoring during her third year.

PhD: Included having 2 children. It was very flexible as she could come home to look after the kids if needs be. Significant publications from PhD.

After the PhD she was set for a regular teaching and research position. However, with kids and a partner who is also an academic, travel was difficult and so collaboration and conference participation was hard. She managed to secure a non-ideal position at Melbourne uni – this included lots of teaching. Made the most of the less-than-optimal situation to introduce new teaching styles, and coordinated extension programs. At some point she needed to decide whether or not she was going to get more involved in teaching. Became the director of the mathematics and statistics learning centre (2007) – within the maths department of the University of Melbourne: 10,000 student enrollments per year.

Involved with changing practice within the department. Became more involved in school issues – it’s important to know where the students come from, to get to uni.

Who are we? What is a standard mathematics educator?

  • Are we mathematicians?
  • Are we education specialists?
  • Are we teachers?
  • Do we mainly do disciplinary research with a bit of teaching research on the side, or vice versa?
  • What’s our age profile?
  • Are we intentional or accidental mathematics educators?

What are the barriers for going further?

As an education expert it’s hard to do regular teaching and research

Education research is often not valued by the department.

In 2011 Melbourne uni introduced the category to being a teaching focused person (different from being a teaching only person). This made it more legitimate to doing education research and she could apply for teaching and learning grants. However, no role models, and no links into the community, or formal training in the area.

Leaders and Enablers

Important to find the local leaders who could help to build the network and the community.

Challenges

  • What are the challenges that exist?
  • Who are the leaders and collaborators?
  • Is there any professional development available?
  • Is there any support in the local group, or validation of what you do?
  • Are there funding opportunities available?
  • What is your expertise, how do you get more expertise?
  • Who is the community and how do you build it?
  • Are you still expected to do disciplinary research?
  • Are you expected to have grad students? Is it possible to get grad students?

In general there has been a resurgence of Australian interest in mathematics education – has been a bit flat until recent times.

Recent initiatives:

Institutional initiatives around teaching and learning:

  1. Widespread introduction of teaching focused roles.
  2. Internal funding opportunities
  3. Change to online learning
  4. Funding opportunities through the OLT
  5. Broad government STEM initiatives and influence of chief scientist
  6. Enhancing teacher training grants

Teaching and Learning projects

Mathsassess

FYImaths (the subject of most of this talk): A network for first year mathematics lecturers

From https://fyimaths.files.wordpress.com

First year mathematics coordination:

  • Started by thinking about how to connect with other first-year mathematics coordinators.
  • Wanted to know what first year coordinators did around the country: Surprised at how few designated first year maths coordinators there were in Australia
  • Wanted to think about first year maths students: Look at transition issues

Goals:

  • Build leadership capacity for coordinators of first year maths
  • To promote and support innovative teaching approaches
  • Think about disseminating the good work that others were doing
  • and three more…

Approach:

  • Interviewed 40 academics in 26 universities in Australia and one in New Zealand
  • Took more than a year
  • Needed to convince colleagues that this was worthwhile (doing the interviews herself, rather than getting a student to do it).

Why do first year coordinators do it?

  • They love to teach
  • Love being with the students
  • They believed that they could make a difference

Challenges

  • Teaching and assessment: Curriculum update and reform, enrollments, databases, timetables, exams, etc.
  • Roles in Leadership: Swamped by large admin tasks
  • Having to deal with multiple student courses, diagnostic testing, needs of advanced students, bridging support
  • High workload, constant interruptions, all-consuming administration, lack of support or respect (first year people, so other colleagues didn’t respect them
  • No validation from colleagues
  • Lack of contact with peers
  • Lack of positional authority to affect change

First Year coordinators:

  • Significant benefits by providing oversight and coordination of first year provided broad perspective of student needs
  • Roles are varied and complex: Wide range of responsibilities – no training!
  • None of the interviewed people had a position description
  • All had a negative impact on career prospects
  • Few were actively involved in disciplinary or education research

Seems like a terrible role! Huge management task with no tools. Needs to innovate but no authority. No time!

FYiMaths Network allowed people to band together to think about the issues that were challenging them in their work:

3 workshops (50-70 people) – FYiMaths acting as facilitators. Feedback from the group shaped the agenda.

  • Attendees found that what they thought were local problems were really global problems – pass rate issues happen at both small rural as well as the largest urban institutions
  • Nobody was turning to the literature to find out what was already written about the issues
  • Few had attended teaching and learning conferences
  • Working in isolation to solve problems
  • This is odd as in general mathematics does include all of these things but they hadn’t taken it over to the teaching and learning sphere.

The first conference was an immediate success and confirmed the need for a network.

Information sharing was key. People just wanted to be able to talk with each other

Forum for talking about concerns that have national implications.

Challenges for first year maths lecturers:

  • Teaching large classes: Role of new technologies, impact of online lectures
  • Inspiring the disengaged: Pressure to engage students and improve results
  • Service teaching: Teaching to a wide range of disciplines, often with the same class, presents challenges in contextualising the mathematics
  • Isolation
  • Limited time for teaching and innovation
  • Diversity of student backgrounds

Huge range of topics discussed

Questions for you:

  • Are your challenges local or global?
  • Do you have a local support network
  • How do you find solutions?
  • How do you find your inspiration?

Main concern:

Assumed knowledge entry standards. Most universities don’t have hard prerequisites – students can come into the university without appropriate skills. Students don’t know the things that first year teachers expect them to have. Individuals felt powerless to change this.

Driving change:

National forum on assumed knowledge in mathematics run in Sydney with 150 attendees in 2014:

  • Influenced the discussion around prerequisites
  • Media attention
  • On the agenda at the ACDS AGM
  • Were able to bring about a minor change in the HESF
  • Presentation to Universities Australia forum
  • Generated a lot of discussion in a variety of instituions
  • Collected data that is being used widely
  • Some department starting to talk about change

Disseminating practice:

A community of practice is springing up:

  • Sharing of practice
  • Links between secondary and tertiary education sectors
  • Inspiring research
  • Growing interest in SoTL participation

FYiMaths now has over 200 people involved.

  • There will be annual workshops for as long as possible.
  • Making the networks state-based, even though the institution is national.
  • Supporting new leaders.
  • Continuing to build connections between mathematicians and scientists
  • Established special interest groups of the AustMS

Is there a role for a network like this in other countries?

From me (Jonathan Shock): Yes!!

 

How clear is this post?