 The equity math ed panel. Some of us are here from the equity workshop. Some of us here from the teacher leadership program. Yeah. And we have a great panel. This is amazing. And if you have any questions, I set up this little hashtag, which I found out yesterday is the wrong hashtag for PCMI. Many of us have been using PCI summer, but I already made the slides. So hit up PCMI 2018 if you're a Twitter, if you have a question to ask. So here's our amazing panel. And the first question I'm going to ask them is to introduce themselves. So I'm not going to go through lengthy introduction just yet. So he's, look at this. This is a dynamite crew. If you want to tweet them directly, those of us who are on Twitter have our handles right there in turquoise. So let's just jump into it. The first question is to introduce yourself. Share a story about issues of equity that are relevant in your work. How did this happen? And were you able to do something about it? And every panel member gets three minutes. And if they go over three minutes, then James Brown or Drake is going to play. So why don't we start with Angelique. Good afternoon. Angelique. Great to see you. I am a STEM education teacher who teaches in high school. I am also a policy advocate who used to work in DC. So I'm even more passionate in the classroom. I have a million equity stories or inequity stories. But one that really resonated recently was when I was teaching an AP algebra accelerated course. And I was also teaching a corrective math special education course. I was observing that quite a few students in the special education course were all students of color. And in evaluating them, I saw that a lot of them had hundreds in the class and was wondering why they weren't being considered for advanced placement as well. And then I was in my advanced placement course. And a lot of the students were failing it. And a lot of those students, the demographic, was white, upper income, very integrated into the community, whereas the students of color were from the outskirts and being bussed in. So I asked my department head how I could get the students out of the AP course. And he told me I couldn't take them out, even if they were failing, because they had been chosen when they were in fourth grade to stay in this course and that they would stay in there to keep the numbers up for the community. Now, the student who was in special education who had 110, lobbied for that student as well. And she was challenged with the idea of moving into the next course, even though she was allowed to move up. As a person of color, she just demeaned herself by saying, black kids don't go in that class. I'd rather get 100 in the special education class with the dumb kids. And that's her quote, unfortunately, because I look like a star here. But when I go to that class, I'm going to be treated as the lowest. And so I had to lobby all year long with her parent, with the administrator, and with the program director of the AP course to have several meetings with the counselor in order to show proof that she deserved to be in the AP class. And by the end of the school year, I was able to get the parents, the principal, and the students assigned off to remove her out of the special education class that she was put in when she was in fourth grade, but no longer needed to be in. But I could never get the AP students out who were failing, and that was the unfortunate part. They had to stay because they were chosen. Hey, I'm Dylan Kane. I teach high school math in Colorado. I taught middle school in Boston before that. And my passion in this space is writing and sharing with teachers. For me, that's mostly in blog form and thinking about how I can both write to learn and write to hear from really smart people about what I have wrong and what I'm missing and how I can keep growing. A story that's compelling for me right now is one that'll be familiar to a lot of people in understanding why students come into classrooms ready to learn or not ready to learn. I was watching at my school a student of color, a Latino student in this case, came into class late and it was just scrambling down something for his homework that he had forgotten to do. And the teacher asked if something along the lines of like, did you do this outside of class where you were supposed to? And he in the moment lied and said he had it done. And the student ended up being disciplined for that mistake in that moment. And juxtaposing that with a situation that happened, I think it was a few weeks before where a white student said something homophobic in a shared Google document that much of the class was looking at. And the student, the teacher reacted to it and passed it up the chain to an administrator. And the student ended up not being punished because his parent made a stink about it and said, this is just a kid. He just made a mistake. He was being impulsive. And there was no consequence for this student and the Latino student wasn't given a chance and wasn't given the benefit of the doubt and the opportunity to trust his intentions and his willingness to learn and thinking about that context with students who come into classrooms already feeling like school isn't a place where they're able to be someone who is valued and who we trust to come into one to learn and come into one to succeed. Good afternoon. My name is Shea Burns. I am an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina. I am new to the whole equity discussion. This is my first time in this workshop, but just with the conversations that we've had this week, I realized that I've been in the conversation but unaware that I was in the conversation. So when I was asked to come up with a story, I thought about, when we talk about equity, this particular instance is more like access. In the math department, probably like many of your departments, we had moved to offering online homework and we used the My Math Lab system. And as many of you know that you use the computers. And so when we switched over to that, a lot of people, for professors, we're like, oh yeah, now they don't have to grade all this math homework. But we didn't think about the fact that many of our students don't have access to computers in their homes. Some of them are going to the libraries and things like that. So we actually had to work with our IT department on campus to make sure that they had the plugins and materials so that they could download it on to the computers in the library. Also talk with the library staff because some of them, we actually found out, were closing early and many of our students, they're in class all day. And so they didn't have the time to do the homework. And also we noticed even in our building, the Wi-Fi wasn't actually as nice as we thought it was. So just with that, we take for granted some things. And so it just opened my eyes and even us talking about it in our workshop that we just need to be more cognizant of is everybody prepared to succeed in our spaces? Hello, my name is Andrea Rosa Rivera. I very recently earned a PhD from UC Riverside. I defended my dissertation in March. Thank you. And in the fall I'll be starting as an assistant professor at California State University East Bay in the Bay Area. So my story of equity is actually from the perspective of a student. I earned my bachelor's degree at one of the Cal States in the Central Valley. So my experience earning a bachelor's degree was that the people around me were all very Hispanic and Latino people. The majority of us were women. So I just kind of had the idea that mathematics was done with Latino people and they were all women. And then I got to grad school and it was a very rude awakening for me in that I got to a department where certainly none of the faculty looked like me, or I mean we had maybe like two women in the faculty. And then definitely the graduate students, I was really the only woman of color for a very long time. So I kind of found myself in Southern California and I was hungry for Latino people and interactions with women and it just seemed like a very ridiculous thing to have when you're in Southern California. So that made me very aware of the issue of lack of diversity in mathematics and it brought a lot of these issues of bringing equity to mathematics to my head and a big reason why I finished the degree and a big motivator for me was so that I could be in a position where I could advocate for students and I could help people kind of bridge the gap that seems to exclude a lot of us. Hey, what's up everybody? My name is Kimai Wilson. I'm an assistant professor at California State University, Los Angeles where I'm in the curriculum and instruction department and my focus is on math education. When I think about equity, right? I think about, and so my research, let me start with this, my research really focuses on how African-American students develop their math and science identities in K-12 spaces and where that work originated from as I moved to my story about equity was I did a pilot project when I was a graduate student which turned into a publication and I really wanted to know black folks in STEM, what are they doing? How are they experiences? And so I went to an R1, a research institution and I wanted to find out how did these African-American students get into STEM majors? So I talked to electrical engineers, biochemistry, people that were majoring in biochemistry, mechanical engineering, physics, right? Because it was, I wanted to create a foundational structure to really understand this math learning, right? And so I talked to these students and I didn't put a call out saying, hey, I wanna just talk to high achieving folk. I just wanted to talk to black folks that were in these spaces and one of the things that resonated with me throughout their entire story when we talk about this notion of equity, they all said everyone identified me as being naturally talented in math. And already that was extremely problematic for me because now I thought about because since we wanna talk about this underrepresentation in STEM, that meant that there are so many African-American students who are not even being reached because they haven't been identified as being naturally talented or gifted in math. And also what pushed that notion for me is that those same students, now that they were in a higher education space, they were marginalized, right? Because now what had been heralded in their K through 12 experience, they had been told all the time, oh, you're smart, you'll do fine, you're awesome. When they got to college, math was no longer a rote memorization but it now became to have them thinking critically about math and they struggled because they didn't have that solid foundation. So when we talk about equity, right, I hope this conversation begins to talk about who are we saying that are mathematicians? What does that look like? Right, and what are the privileges that are attached to that? Thanks, Kimai. Y'all can hear me, right? Yeah. Oh, I set the timer for myself. My name is Teddy Chow. I'm an assistant professor at the Ohio State University. I do a lot of work in the K through five space, specifically on use of technology to increase equity and access for children, specifically children coming from communities of color. I used to be a middle school teacher. I taught seventh and eighth grade math in IS 318 in Brooklyn, New York. And I think a lot about my experiences walking into a math classroom in Brooklyn, being a Chinese American male who benefited a lot from the model minority stereotype growing up. And having a lot of privilege as to how people position me mathematically and then having to check that and having to confront that as a teacher really makes me do the work in equity today. Sorry I wanna share is from my second year teaching, I was a seventh grade teacher and I got my butt kicked my first year. I mean, I was a horrible teacher my first year, right? I went in teaching the way that I had learned, right? The way that I had succeeded in college by writing things on the board, expecting kids to take notes and then giving them homework and then asking them the next day if they had any questions about the homework and then it's moving on to the next lesson, right? And I don't think anyone learned at all except for maybe one kid, right? But my second year, my principal said, hey, Teddy, we have a pretty intense special class. It's about eight kids, it's a small class and I think, let's see how you do with it. And we're gonna give you a lot of support. You're gonna have some power professionals in there and you're gonna operate as a team. We're gonna have a unit in which the literacy, the English teacher, the social studies teacher, we're all together working with this one cohort of special needs students. And so I said, okay, I'm down, let's try it. And I remember when I got the roster, I was like, oh, that's interesting, this class is entirely male, okay, cool, right? And then that first day is like, before we even started school that year, I mean, my team, we met and we came up with a plan. But it was a plan that was heavily based on discipline and a system of rewards and of consequences, positive consequences and negative consequences. And I remember very specifically, like when I met my class and we all introduced this plan that we were gonna do as a team, I was like, it's interesting, every single kid in here is either Latinx or black, male. And I think going through that year and then using a plan that took things away from kids but also rewarded kids, helped me understand the complexity of what we do in our schools, right? I also taught a gifted and talented class that was primarily white and Asian in Brooklyn, New York, right? And I got to see like, what are we doing here? What's happening with these students? In one class, we got to have these great activities and events, in another class, we were taking things away from students, expecting them to listen to us, to be obedient and to follow our control, right? And that really opened my eyes. I mean, I loved the school I was in, I got good support, but I also saw exactly what we were doing. We were setting our kids up, those special education students, for prison. That's what it was. Oh, and I'm time is up. That was good, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So let's move on to the next question. In your eyes, what are the major issues preventing equity in the culture of mathematics? And so we said such as things like racism, conceptions of smartness, sexism, economic privilege, whatever you want to talk about. Why don't we start again with Angelique? Just from my experience, I'd have to say the challenge of equity, just tying back to my story, was a school that was majorly diverse, looking for advancement in STEM at all levels, consciously corralling, just like you said, corralling students by scores that they had gotten when they were in fourth grade and never releasing them from that choice. Imagine if any of us made a mistake in our life. None of us have. But imagine if you did, right? And nobody ever forgave you. That's what pipelining kids in a system where they will continually be tracked, which is illegal, but they're doing it anyway, to their own demise. I mean, and now the tracking doesn't even have to occur academically, that young lady who was in the special ed class tracked herself. I'm supposed to be with the dumb kids. I'm black. That's what she told me. And she said, people have been telling me since seventh grade. Now she's an 11th grader in a special ed, you know, 11th grade class, doing exceptionally. And I'm like, you really don't need to be in here. You're actually just taking up a lot of attention in time because you always need to advance. And I was like, you need to be where advanced kids go to grow. And she's like, all my teachers wanted me to go. So she psychologically was already prepared to fulfill the mission of being the worst in her own culture, in her own academic standing. And every teacher before me, that means 10 years had allowed it to happen. And so for me, what was critical is that I use that moment to go, it stops with me. And so I couldn't convince the girl that she would have more options and more opportunities if I changed her classroom or her academic path. She actually resisted me. And then I called her mom and her mom was like, well, why would we want her to do better if she's getting an A? An A is an A in any class. And I'm like, but an A in this class gets you an A and this one gets you to graduate school. And the mom was like, well, I'm okay with an A in this class, because that's where she is today. And there's something to say for living in the present. But ultimately, we know that our students, just like those students who were in my advanced placement class, they were getting like an F minus, but they were chosen there in fourth grade. And they were like, let us out. A group of them, like five of them. We've asked administration. We've asked our parents, but because they were white privileged kids whose parents were a part of the school board, they were never allowed to leave. I really appreciate Kimai's point about students that we label talented or not talented. I was at the National Council Teachers of Mathematics annual meeting last year in 2017. In the opening session, there's like five or six or 7,000 math teachers in the room. And the person speaking is talking about some mathematical idea. And they throw up a slide of the mathematician who came up with the idea they're talking about and it's an old white dude. And he makes this, what to him was probably an offhand comment saying, oh, looks like a mathematician, doesn't it? And I think of that preconception as just a microcosm of how we think about the students that come into our classrooms. We have certain assumptions about what a mathematician looks like and what it doesn't look like. And if a student doesn't fit those preconceptions, we make all these small decisions, whether it's looking at a piece of work that we might dismiss as wrong or incomplete and not looking to say what's right here or what question are they answering that I just didn't ask. And those small touches that we hear from so many students that they pursued careers in mathematics because of that one individual or those two individuals who said like, I believe in you, I know you can do this. You have the potential to do mathematics, to be that person. And I think we have a lot of work to do in recognizing that there are structures like Angelique's talking about that no one wants to change because they're the status quo. But we know that these assessments that we use to track and sort students are proxies for financial resources, for race, for parental involvement. And that's not what we want. We don't want to select students for mathematics based on those proxies. And so for me, equity is recognizing that these currents exist and if we pretend they don't, they're gonna keep pushing certain kids along in the direction that they're going and that we have to do like conscious and active work to row in the opposite direction. And that's work for folks like me. Like I look like that mathematician up on the screen knowing that I have that privilege and it's my job to learn and to recognize it and to constantly work to see from other perspectives and to see my students from other perspectives and then work to change those structures and to create a new paradigm for what it means to see potential in mathematics. We think that issues surrounding, equity on the higher ed level, I would think that it has to do with the structure. It has to do with the structure. Is that better? We're good. Thanks. It has to do with the structure of the system on higher ed. I know for those of us that are professors at universities, when we first get to the university, we're on the tenure track. So we're very selfish in trying to pursue to secure our position. So unless you're feeling like the system is inequitable for you, you probably won't think about it being inequitable for somebody else. And then when you're in the tenure system, a lot of times for many of us, they say don't rock the boat until you get tenure. So again, your voice is silenced on that until you get tenure and then now you're trying to get full. So you're still in this, the structure allows you to be silent. When you see some things, you don't necessarily say everything because you're selfishly thinking about yourself and your livelihood. And I think just from a female's perspective, the issue is also is money. The university, most universities are not paying women the same thing as they pay men. And so from cost standpoint, it's until the university thinks that it's beneficial to pay women more than not. And then it kind of does a cycle because we have conversations with our female students and they see us in this profession and many of them are like, no, I don't want that one. And even the duties that we're assigned in our department is for other service assignments. As far as the females, a lot of us are asked to do so-called maternal things like advise students and all this other stuff where we have the skills and the knowledge maybe to do some of the research assignments. But unless we push for that, which some of us do do that, but others not, we're still gonna have all of these issues with making it equitable on the higher end. So I think one of the bigger problems that I've noticed is that people have a hard time seeing mathematics as something personal or something that you create. So if someone writes a poem or composes some music or paints a painting, then it's something very personal to them. But as mathematicians, we're creating all the time and we don't have this sense that it's something personal or something that a real human being does. So I say that a lot to my students. I say mathematics, it's something that real people do. And often they kind of think, okay, well, it's just like this robot or this person that looks like someone from the Bing Bang Theory. And everybody thinks of this one thing when they think of what a mathematician should be. And so it's hard for them to think, okay, well, I can do mathematics too. And it's not just mathematics coming out of a professor or coming out of a book, but it's really something that can be personal. And I think if students can see themselves as the creators of math, then maybe we can get around some of these issues of women feeling like they can't do it or people of color feeling like they can't do it. So just kind of finding a way to make mathematics something more personal and something that real people can do. If we can be honest and transparent in this room, the problem with equity is that we continue to think of it as an add-on. We continue to think it's something that we think about after the instruction. Or, oh, why didn't my, you know, how come these African-American students aren't doing well or how come these Latino or Latinx students aren't doing well? And instead of thinking internally, what is my lesson not doing? What is my instruction not doing? That's a very different question because now that requires us to look at ourselves as educators, as teachers, and not as an add-on, but where do we actually, how are we even thinking about mathematics? That becomes critical in this equity conversation. Shout out to my group, my working group that I've been working with, this we, Ronnie, Beth, Peter, and Nick, and we talked about equity being a lifestyle. Equity as a lifestyle, right? This is something that we need to live, breathe, talk about, be about when we even think about math problems and the math lesson. I'm starting from a place of equity, right? I teach a math methods course, right? And our part of our equity as a lifestyle that talks about access, that talks about breaking down hierarchies, right? That talks about achievement, and that talks about developing agency for your students, right? I do something, a beginning, when I meet my math methods students who are pre and in service teachers for the very first time, the very first thing, before we talk about any mathematics, I need to know what positionality you are walking into my classroom space with, do you value even your own community mathematically? What are your beliefs about mathematics, right? How has been your interpersonal relationships experience that you've had with teachers with mathematics because we fail to think about all of that plays into how we're going to now teach math to our students, to our children, to our kids. So if I come in with the space with, yeah, I learn math on my own, you better believe that's gonna be manifested in the teaching. So I'm not gonna be worried about creating relationship with my students because that's not my frame of reference. And so part of when we start talking about equity, we really gotta stop thinking about it as an add-on or it's something I apply on after the fact or every conversation we need to have about math, we need to start thinking how is this reaching everyone? How is this inclusive, right? Because otherwise, we'll be here five years from now and there'll still be under-representation of women and minorities in mathematics. And we'll have the model minority syndrome, right? And so in order for us to disrupt that, that's how we get at equity. And until then, it becomes a disingenuous conversation that we're having over and over again, right? Until we really begin to think critically about this work. Oh, I see that. Yeah. Wow, I'm honored just to be on this stage with y'all. This is powerful stuff. And I've seen some tweets start to come in. If you have questions, feel free to come in on the tweets. We'll switch to the Q and A in a second. The big issue that I have with equity right now is that sort of building up of what you're saying, okay, my equity is an add-on, but also equity in the term social justice are trendy, right? There are these phrases that are thrown around so easily, so readily. Sort of like, hey, you know what? These millennial teachers need to, they love social justice, they love equity. Let's give it to them, right? And it's done without a thought. And it's done as if equity is some form of diversity. You know what? If you make sure that your classroom or your teaching staff looks kind of like a rainbow, you're cool, right? Make sure you have an LGBTQIA person in your staff, you're cool, right? And that's whack, right? Because that's a surface level band-aid fix to a deep historical issue, right? The biggest issue I see is that we as a community, as mathematicians, as lovers of math, as math educators, as teachers, is we're not at the table to have these deep, big policy conversations for our country, right? We're letting this conversation happen without us. We're letting people tell us what is and what is math. We're letting people tell us how to assess math. We're letting people tell us how we need to judge and rate our own teachers and what teachers need to do, right? As opposed to us being there and talking about ourselves, talking about the violence that mathematics has done to many of the people in our country. Talking about how, in my methods course, I start with the fraction three-fifths, right? Some people talk about fractions a lot, and many adults in this world, when you talk about fractions, they immediately have this knee-jerk reaction. This is based on trauma they've been living in because of mathematics anxiety, right? But why is three-fifths so important to our country's history? Ronnie? Mm-hmm. Because of the... It's in the Constitution. It's in the Constitution, right? So, Ronnie, I'm gonna re-voice what Ronnie says. Black people were seen as three-fifths of a person in our Constitution, right? That is a deep, dehumanizing way of looking at people of color, black people specifically, of slaves at the time, that is written into our Constitution, right? It's not about why fractions are painful. I say fractions are written, that this dehumanizing way of talking about people as a fractional unit. Not even a whole person is deeply embedded into our Constitution, and we're not even talking about that, right? So, recognizing the history of the way math has been used in a violent way to oppress certain peoples, right? It's something that we all need to talk about when we talk about math, right? And we're not having that conversation, right? And I think what that leads to is what Rochelle Gutierrez is talking about, what Kelly McArthur was talking about yesterday, a rehumanizing way of looking at math, right? Not humanizing, right? Because if we look at some indigenous knowledge, if we look at some of the ways that we learned math, it was totally humanizing. It was wonderful. Many of us are here because we had great experiences with math. Oh, that's my time. Gosh. Ha ha ha ha. Okay. Why don't we jump into some Q and A? So I am going to honor the tweet that came in just now from Chad Topaz, and let me re-voice this. Chad says, I believe it shouldn't fall on the shoulders of groups affected by underrepresentation or exclusion to fix these problems. Regardless of how you yourself identify, to what degree do you see people with majority status helping address these issues? So I'll re-voice this. What can people who have power do? Right? And so let's open this up to the group. Ha ha ha. Keep on, you want to start first? Yeah, I'll give you that. Yeah, I'll give you that. Okay, first up. Yeah. Ha ha ha. You know, I'm trying to figure out how to shape my response, but oftentimes people come and want me to talk about African American achievement and talk about what the problems are. And sometimes my response is I'm tired of talking, and I'm gonna be very transparent and honest. I need white folks to talk. I need you to speak up about it, right? You know, the backs of talking about racism, talking about inequity, often fall on the backs of minorities. And I'm tired of talking about it.