 Um, and so part of what I've been working on this week is thinking about rehumanizing the content and methods courses for elementary teachers by thinking about changing assessment and grading. So we have three content courses. We have a number and operations course for elementary teachers, an algebra course for elementary teachers, and a geometry course for elementary teachers. And then we also have two methods courses. And so when thinking about assessment, just paper and pencil test and quizzes weren't allowing me to really see what my students know. Another thing that was frustrating for me in that process is that the way I used to assess my students, it was kind of like, do you know this within this week-long unit that I put on the syllabus and you either do or you don't. But when I think about myself in real life, I'm very thankful that, you know, learning and growth is not bound to some unit. And that I have the opportunity to continue to grow and develop and demonstrate that. And so I wanted to provide a little bit more flexibility for my students. And also, we can't really show and demonstrate what we know if we're very stressed or very anxious. And so a lot of that kind of comes with, you know, sitting in like a big lecture hall and I can only use paper that you gave me because perhaps I wrote something on the paper and invisible ink before I got there, you know. And so just all of these kind of formalities that come with testing. And so what I've been working on this week is thinking about what is it that I want my students to know and to be able to do at the end of a particular course. And so there are some standards that I want my students to know and be able to do. And so I am going to, we're still going to have assignments and tests and quizzes and projects throughout the semester. But at the end of the semester, we're going to sit down and kind of co-assign their grade. And so even though I'm going to be giving them feedback throughout the semester, they have the opportunity to revise assignments, to work on assignments in different ways, to bring in other artifacts to show me at the end of the semester why they have mastered a particular standard. And that just feels more humanizing for me because there is still a time limit there, right? Because there is a semester, you know, so you don't get all four years to master a concept. But there are so many things that our students can do that we might not be able to see. So perhaps they will bring in video clips of them working with students and explaining concepts to students. Perhaps they will have audio recordings. Perhaps they will create blogs that are able to demonstrate different things to me. But so there are guidelines for this. This is a very quick overview. But so I am aiming to re-humanize one aspect of my course by thinking about changes to grading and assessment. Thanks. Hi. I'm Brian Katz or my students call me BK. That's perfectly fine. I am an algebraic geometer by training and that matches my aesthetics. I certainly like modulate spaces and functors and sort of categorical things. So as a mathematician, I feel like I'm basically a philosopher. But over the last 12 years, I've developed a second disciplinary expertise in mathematics education and that was a long time coming and it was a lot of work. Thanks. I'm tenured at a small liberal arts college in western Illinois, but I'm in the middle of a two-year leave. Last year I taught high school in Manhattan and next year I'll be a visiting associate professor at Smith College. And so I'm just really excited about these kinds of adventures. And if you know my name, you probably know me for one of two things. I'm very visible in the community of teaching with inquiry. I was in charge of the IBL Sigma and I ran the National Inquiry-Based Learning and Teaching Conference recently. And I'm involved in a NSF-funded project for four-day workshops, professional development for collegiate faculty who want to learn to teach with inquiry. And otherwise, you might know my name from the editorial board for the AMS blog Inclusion Exclusion, which is I hope you're reading and if you're not, now would be a great time to start. What am I interested in broadly? Well, broadly, I'm interested in inquiry and what does that mean? For me, Rasmussen and Larson have recently identified sort of four pillars for what might be inquiry and sort of attending to equitable practices is certainly one of them. But for me, inquiry is mathematics that's driven by questions that make sense from the learner's perspective. So that's sort of my guiding definition of inquiry and then all the other dimensions need to be in place. So if I'm centering questions that make sense from the learner's perspective, then what I really mean is for them to be authorities and knowers. And so that brings me to very philosophical, epistemological questions. What is the nature of our mathematical knowledge and where does it come from? But in context, especially in the context of an active learning classroom, not everyone has equal access to being a knower. So this brings in sort of the necessity of a justice or equity dimension. And all of this, for me, is particularly important in the context of teachers, future teachers especially, so that they can go out into a world and bring positive experiences to children rather than what Rachelle has sometimes called a slow violence of some of the dehumanizing examples that we talked about. So what did I do this week? I present as white and male, you might have noticed. I'm queer, and so I come to some equity work in part because I sort of, by default, I have always belonged. But the utopian nature of our sort of neutral vision of mathematics has said, everyone belongs here, but we don't talk about identity. And if identity feels salient to you in this space, then you don't belong here. And so because my identities are things that people don't often see, I sort of feel like I have one foot in both categories there. And so that sort of, this dates me, but that's how I learned to see the matrix. And so I want to use my positionality. So through these IBL workshops and through my role in the Inclusion Exclusion Editorial Award, I have the ability to bring people who didn't come to rehumanizing mathematics through marginalizing experiences into the conversation. And I want everyone to be involved. And so thank you for helping me work on my project today by being here. And so I want the AMS blog to, I want us to think strategically about what conversations do we want all mathematicians to be having. And similarly, when people are doing professional development for active learning, what is the appropriate and effective way to engage equity questions, equity justice questions as part of that work? Oh, thanks. Can you click to our next slide? So this is just a reminder that you have note cards. So that coming up soon is the Q&A portion. So if you have a question, write it down, pass it to the outsides. And the rest of our working group will filter them for us so that we have a good Q&A at the end. Oh, we're back to me. Okay, speaking of using my position, I have been given the role of offering some loving challenges. So Kiran Kedlaya pointed out that mathematicians love a challenge. And so we're giving you puzzles. And in some ways, what we're saying is that we take mathematics as a discipline very seriously. And we should think not only about mathematics, but also our teaching seriously as a discipline and treat the big problems and challenges therein as similar kinds of scale of challenges. And so I have just a couple of loving challenges to suggest. So the first one is, as people engage in equity or rehumanizing work, we use words, and we're sort of already talking about this, we use words that might have other meanings. One thing you might do is assume that technical words have been theorized thoroughly and carefully in much the same way that normal has been theorized carefully. It might have multiple meanings in different contexts, but in a particular context, we mean something very specific by it in mathematics. And so just sort of that default assumption, I feel like I code switch as a mathematician or a mathematics educator. I sort of have one foot in each, and maybe I have an accent in both. You'll have to tell me later. But one of our participants pointed out that sometimes we get, as people in doing justice and rehumanizing work, that we get questions that sort of say, tell me how to fix equity, or tell me about all of your work in one minute. And it would be the same thing as if me, as an algebraic geometer, went to a functional analyst and said, you got 30 seconds to tell me what your sub-question inside your discipline is. Like, I just don't have the technical context to do that. And so that can be a slightly frustrating experience. Somebody here, in a very positive way, said in response to one of our colleagues talking about what we've been doing this week, was, oh, that sounds like just good teaching. And in many ways, that's right, right? The idea that good teaching should include justice, rehumanizing dimensions, absolutely. On the other hand, there's some depth. But it also often sort of stops at that and says, like, oh, there's some answers. It would be great when a loving challenge would be to follow it up and use that as a lens to look at your own practice, right? To engage with what am I doing? How can I use this to understand my own practice? A small one, how many of you went to the NSF presentation a couple of days ago? So you've all heard the phrase broadening impact, broadened impact, right? Often as equity people, we get an email saying, I need to submit this grant tomorrow. Can I put you on the grant as the equity person? And can you write a couple of paragraphs about the broader impact? If we really want this work to be effective, it needs to be part of the design from the beginning. And so that would be a challenge to think about, including justice and re-humanizing from the beginning. We probably don't have time to talk about all this in great detail, but hiring is a really big deal question right now. And it's often treated as sort of an either or. Either you can get somebody who diversifies your demographics, or you can get the best researcher, or you can, and it's not a zero sum game there. Yeah, sure. And for one, we need people with basic interpersonal, intercultural skills, because every part of this work involves interactions with other people. And that's part of the work, right? In the department, if you get somebody who happens to be able to publish a paper, but all the graduate students leave, like you have not hired the person who did best by your hire. And so that should be part of your thinking from the beginning. A particular word you want to be careful with is meritocracy or fit, because that's often a subtle way for us to say this person, what they are good at matches well with what I understood already, as opposed to what's the new thing that they could bring that could be good. I think I've talked about the other one. So those are some loving challenges from one mathematician to a room full of mathematicians. I think we're just wanting to question it. Oh, didn't you have a question? Oh, this is still kind of a question for the answers. Yeah, I think we're gonna, we have about 10 minutes left. And so I think people have been submitting questions. I've seen our lovely teammates running back and forth down the aisles. Do we have any questions, teammates? Okay, great. Welcome Adriana. Our beautiful Adriana Salerno. Do you want to read the question or? Do you want to read the question? Oh yeah, you just need to pick, right? Because we can't answer them all at once. So, yeah. So someone asked, or said, the low income and at risk white students are marginalized as well, but they don't feel like they have been included in this conversation. What would supporting these students look like or how do we include students like this in the conversation? So I don't know how to lay out a full framework, but one thing that my institution in the Midwest is thinking about is we have historically been residential, small liberal arts college, but more and more we have commuter students which tend to be lower income students for our campus and just thinking really carefully about not assuming that everybody is already in the same dorm and can meet in the evening or just has easy access to the on campus resources all the time. And so while we don't want to be universal with rehumanizing mathematics, we do want to say like looking at our students, what is their lived experience? What are they bringing? If all of our students are bringing concerns about sleeping enough because they have to work 40 hours on top of coming to school, then that's one of the key dimensions. So we're, yes, historically other groups have had more systemic marginalizing experiences who want to make sure we attend to them, but in our particular context, if that's the group of students who's not being engaged, who doesn't feel their humanity is being expressed, that's where the attention would go. It feels like it's kind of the same thing, doesn't it? So this one's kind of long one, so I'm gonna summarize it a little bit. So what do you say to people, and I think that you mentioned this a little bit, but who say that they want to choose the most qualified candidate when there are maybe counterparts of people of color who, so the question asker says that a person of color, I think in terms of hiring teachers, a person of color might be better for your students and your set of students, but someone is saying they want to choose the most qualified candidate, but the candidate is white. One thing that I would say to this and that we've talked a lot about this week is kind of unpacking words. So like what does qualified mean, right? And so typically it may mean they have the most publications, they came from a particular institution, and we have to in some ways redefine what does qualified mean. Those things may be important, but if we are hiring a teacher, it is about who's also gonna be good for those students. It is about who's also gonna be good to bring different perspectives into a particular department so that we can all grow. Sometimes I think we want to bring people in that really are just a mirror for ourselves and so oh, we wanna bring somebody in that fits because they're like a carbon copy of me. And so part of that is we really going into the process, want to identify and kind of tease that apart. And so when we run job searches, I'm very intentional about how we develop rubrics because we have to have rubrics to rank stuff and so we need to be intentional about what goes into those rubrics so that we can count these different aspects that are important to us. Yeah, just a concrete version of that is actually write down the list of needs for the department beforehand before you're looking at specific people and then use that as a guide which is best practices across the board. So we have a question about how do you call out inappropriate or exclusionary behavior by people of higher status, especially if you value their opinion or if they have power over you. And so two very different answers. One is I couldn't find it this morning but a meme's been floating around that says sometimes I respond not to change someone else but because my silence would change me. So sometimes we just have to be those people. The other one is there are lots of people here there's plenty of allies. So it's one of the ways I think I function in lots of spaces is because people read me as white and male I can push back on things without it being tagged as a personal vendetta. I can talk about whiteness in spaces that some of my colleagues who are people of color can't. So finding an ally asking them if they might be able to help broach the subject is one way. Hi. This is a wonderful Lovica. Oh, hello everyone. Someone just talked about giving respecting every the various identities of their students in approaching this rehumanizing mathematics how can they improve confidence in doing this? What are some suggestions? To improve confidence. Yes. In respecting identities. Respecting identities and to encourage the, just they talked about in terms of bringing intention to when they notice disrespectful behaviors and thinking about rehumanizing mathematics having confidence to actually implement those dimensions. How does the person themselves have developed the confidence to be able to implement the... Okay, I don't know why I keep getting to go first but one thing I learned from my students a couple of years ago about, we had them on a panel about microaggressions and they said the single most important thing for them was that if there was a person of authority who was present for it that they at least tag it and say we gotta come back to that or that made me uncomfortable. That our silence in that context was the thing that hurt them more than the actual act of their peer. And that was really liberating in many ways for lots of the people who were at, lots of the faculty who were at the panel because you don't have to know how to respond in the moment to do this. You just have to say that made me uncomfortable. We're gonna have to come back to that later. So you can find other resources. You can think about it some other way. You can decide to do something one on one rather than publicly but so that's one thing that helps with my confidence. On the other end of the spectrum, I feel an ethical obligation to be a multifaceted human being with my students. And I understand that this is complicated because of how I look. Students give me lots of leeway in terms of being competent and having mathematical authority and not everyone gets that leeway but for me it's important. So I don't like using a title because it centers my mathematical authority. Again, it's complicated. I also, you know, I don't like have an episode where I come out to my students but I am out on campus because it's important to me that students know that there are queer mathematicians out in the world. And so because I have been a multifaceted human being, it doesn't seem weird to them that we would sometimes talk about some of our identities. I do ask them math bios on the first day. I do ask them what pronouns they wanna use and that sort of sets the norm that if they feel the need to talk about something, they can and that makes it feel less like at seven weeks in the first time we were ever saying something about identity is happening now because it happened on the first day. It feels much lower stakes. Did you ask? I think two things. One is that, you know, there's a level of commitment to this, you know, work that's important. You know, so really being, I mean, when you think, so when you think about how you are, became confident in mathematics, right? You know, like think about how many years you studied mathematics. And so you are very confident if someone asks you to go to the board and present a problem or to lead some type of discussion. So when you think about that, in some ways it reminds me of this, you know, like we have to all spend time really kind of deconstructing what we know about race, about culture, about wealth, about colonization, about identity, about all of these things. And we have to constantly check ourselves. You know, like even me as a black woman, I was raised, you know, in a family that was, you know, we weren't wealthy, but you know, we were more well off. So there are things that I'm always having to think about because sometimes socioeconomic status can be a blind spot for me. And so I have to think about that in my work. But it's something that I'm committed to doing daily. And so we feel more comfortable the more we study this, the more we read, the more we engage with people about it. And it's also not because sometimes people will come to me and say, hey, this happened to a black student in my class. Can you tell me what to do? You know, no. You know, like that is a position I don't like kind of being put in because it's not, you know, one person's job in your department to kind of advise or be a consultant about anything that's like equity or, you know, racially motivated that happens in the department. But I think it's on us to also critically engage in reading certain things and just really unpacking some of these constructs for ourselves. I'll just end maybe with this last comment. One of the things we've been doing in our workshop is not just thinking about the rehumanizing framework, but expecting that, you know, acknowledging that if we really are making change, we're gonna piss some people off. And if we're gonna piss some people off, then we have to have the same kind of knowledge and sensibilities and confidence around navigating the politics. And so we've been talking about creative and subordination. We've been thinking, we've been doing rehearsals. Like, how do you say this stuff? Who do you say it? What language do you use? How do you think about the context? But I just wanna come back to that idea of the confidence and BK started a little bit when he was saying, you know, if I don't say anything, if I'm silent, then maybe that's gonna affect me and who I am, how I feel about myself. And Marielle was commenting on how this is really a kind of a marathon, not a sprint, right? This isn't like, I'm gonna stand up for this one thing. It'll be the only thing I have to stand up for. You have to really be preparing yourself for like, this is gonna be the first thing I stand up for. This is gonna be the 10th thing I stand up for, but I'm gonna have to keep standing up. I think a lot of times when people think about taking a risk, they tend to do this kind of cost benefit analysis. If I'm having a conversation with somebody and it's very adversarial, and maybe this person is my peer, or maybe this person will vote on my tenure, or maybe this person tells me is in charge of me, we wonder like, if I stand up, will I convince this person of anything differently? And that's kind of one level to think about it. The other is to think about, well, if I stand up, what is that signaling to other people about the kind of person that I am and how they see me? But a third thing to think about is, when we stand up in situations publicly, we're also modeling for other people that are around us what it looks like to stand up. So even if you get nowhere with that interaction of what you just tried to convince the person to do differently about the policy or moving away from deficit views of students, you are both feeling good about yourself that you didn't just sit there and were silent and you're kind of communicating to other people, but you're also showing people, and especially if you are from the dominant class, if you're white, if you're male, if you're seen as somebody who has status and you stand up, you're showing what does it look like when people stand up and it doesn't benefit them. Last reminder to my white friends, when we get excited about justice and re-humanizing work, we often end up then putting an extra burden on people of color around us. So rather than doing that, I suggest you Google Rachel's papers and read them or just to advertise the blog one more time. There's lots of great stuff there. Adriana is our editor-in-chief. So anyways, so that just a reminder not to accidentally cause an extra burden because you want to start doing more of this work. Last one. I just want to thank you guys for coming today. I really appreciate everybody, some of the examples that were shared publicly. This is something that we all have to be committed to for our own humanity, for the humanity of people that we interact with and students that we serve because we need each other to get through this. So I just want to thank you all for sharing for being vulnerable. I hope something was said here that makes you think. I hope you think about how these eight dimensions may already show up in your work or how you can get them to show up in your work. And that you'll even kind of carry them with you the next couple of weeks. And thank you to our wonderful team that's been engaged with us all week. And I think, are we dismissed? Do you need the mic once again, Ray? Okay. Okay. Okay, well thank you very much again. That was really inspiring. Thank you. Okay, so I think for you now so there's another thing in 15 minutes and please come for square dancing at 545. Thanks.