31 – Principles Conclusions: The Principles and the Maths Camps

[00:00:06] Santiago: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS principle. I am Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with David Stern, a founding director for IDEMS. 

Hi David. 

[00:00:19] David: Hi Santiago. 

This is it, we’ve gone through all the principles, we’re now discussing them as a whole. 

[00:00:26] Santiago: Yeah, and I have the joyful task of editing as well, which is an interesting task. I’m listening through all the episodes and it’s amazing how much information we managed to get into this series. 

[00:00:46] David: I mean, it’s such an important topic for us as an organisation. Whether it’s important for people outside, I don’t know, but it is this fact that these are the core of IDEMS, they’re the heart, they’re, most of them predate IDEMS as an organisation, they’re part of our DNA as an organisation.

[00:01:04] Santiago: I know, I was there when some of these were even emerging with the maths camps. 

[00:01:09] David: Yeah. 

[00:01:10] Santiago: And that’s something I want to discuss a bit in more detail. This project, this idea of the math camps, which other organisations have taken over, and scaled it a bit…

[00:01:24] David: I would argue they haven’t scaled it, but they’ve made it sustainable in a number of different places. I suppose they’ve scaled deep, have you heard of this scaling up, scaling out, scaling deep? They have scaled deep rather than necessarily up or out. And that’s an interesting sort of reflection. 

[00:01:44] Santiago: Can you tell me about the distinctions? I haven’t heard of that before. 

[00:01:48] David: Okay. So scaling up is what most of people think of, this is sort of, you are getting into the political structures, actually changing systems within politics, within policy, you know, achieving scale in that way that it then becomes something which is part of, let’s say government or whatever it may be.

[00:02:06] Santiago: Systems thinking. 

[00:02:07] David: Well, no, there’s not necessarily systems thinking, it’s actually, it’s the institution building, it’s making it part of policy. You go up in the hierarchies of things you’re going to. Scaling out, this is getting more numbers, it’s the same thing, but with other groups, with other people.

And scaling deep, this is where, to me, the best example with the maths camps is what happened in Ethiopia, where, I suppose, there was an element of scaling up as well. But the scaling deep was that these ideas became so ingrained, they became part of many different aspects of things that were happening in Bahir Dar. They have other camps that were there and many of the ideas were then part of the thinking. Change hearts and minds, it really became part of the way some of the lecturers thought that in different ways. 

[00:02:59] Santiago: And it became part of the institution in many ways.

[00:03:01] David: But that’s scaling up. So the institutionalisation, that part of it is scaling up. So this is now the powers that be actually took it over, they put it in, they made sure there was a budget for it every year, it didn’t need to be applied for. That sort of, that institutional ownership, that would be an instance of scaling up.

Whereas the way it changed the way people thought and felt, you know, hearts and minds, that’s scaling deep. 

[00:03:28] Santiago: I see. And thinking about it, I suppose we haven’t given much context on these maths camps. They started in 2011, 2012, I think, in Kenya. 

[00:03:39] David: Wasn’t it 2010? 

[00:03:41] Santiago: Around that time.

[00:03:43] David: It’s 2010, 2011 was when it was sort of happening and coming out. 

[00:03:47] Santiago: And you started it with some of your postgraduate students and got groups of students, secondary school students, not necessarily interested in mathematics, to explore mathematics in a fun, engaging, non curricular way for a week. 

[00:04:06] David: It’s really the other way round. Some of my postgraduate students started it, supported by me. It was very much Zach, who of course I had an episode with already, it was his idea. He felt that we were doing teacher trainings but we should reach the kids directly, and so he, alongside Mike Obiero, who I’m sure I will get to interview soon, they really, they were the ones who really conceived it.

Actually with, of course, some of the founders of SAMI then, you know, Emily Hobbs, who’s now Emily Fleming, and Jeff, and they took it up. And this is where I suppose there has been elements of scaling up, which have happened because these institutions have grown around it.

The African Maths Initiatives came out of it, and then SAMI, that’s AMI, and then SAMI, Supporting African Maths Initiatives. And then of course AMI Ghana was born out of the maths camps in Ghana, which then spread. So it went from Kenya to Ethiopia to Ghana. It’s been in nine countries, African countries, I believe now. Of course there’s been the camps in London that you ran. 

[00:05:11] Santiago: Yes. 

[00:05:12] David: But how is this relating to our principles? We’ve just talked about maths camps, which I always love to do. 

[00:05:17] Santiago: Well, I think there’s one more detail that I would like to give, which is that INNODEMS, our counterpart in Kenya, is now running maths camps on a semi regular basis, several a year, because they just have that experience and they can just go in and run a maths camp quite well.

[00:05:35] David: And this is, of course, part of our principles of Local Innovation, Continually Evolving.

[00:05:40] Santiago: I wanted to focus on maths camps because there are so many of our principles that we could discuss. I’m looking at Scalable Impact and how we describe it, “the solutions can be replicated”. 

[00:05:52] David: Yes, but I think I would argue that we hoped the scalability of the maths camps would be more than it’s currently been. And we actually gave up on a little bit of that ambition because of simply some of the elements of Sustainable Development. For the maths camps to really take off, you know, they were sustainable at the level at which they were, which required this sort of high level of expert impact, a small set of volunteers, this combination of international and local volunteers and so on.

But to get the Viral Scaling, the maths camp wasn’t the right vehicle. And that’s where a number of other initiatives have been conceived since then, this Local Innovation. In Kenya, one of the things they’ve done is they’ve thought about going to maths ambassadors. And thinking about that as a way, using the virtual math camps materials that were developed, these open educational resource, Open by Default, that were developed during COVID, and you know, enabling those to get out to different communities and different people in different ways, Options by Context.

That’s sort of really been at the heart of trying to think how to get to the Scalable Impact, because our current, our core math camp model, we know it’s impactful, but it hasn’t been, well, I suppose it has been virally scaling, but at a very low rate, the R number is greater than one, but it’s still only just greater than one. And you really, if you want to get good viral scaling, you need to have the replication rate being higher. And for that, we need to remove some of the barriers. 

[00:07:26] Santiago: Yes, and then the Sustainable Development comes into question, because those two combined are quite challenging to achieve. 

[00:07:36] David: Well, I mean, this is where we, I am very comfortable, the maths camps in their current form are sustainable. I mean, the first four or five years I was at every single maths camp in every country and I was needed to make sure that the sort of model that we were building was being adhered to and so on. And then I went cold turkey. I’ve not been to a maths camp, I figured it out. It’s been 10 years. 

It’s been 10 years since I’ve been to a maths camp. One of these wonderful events that happens every year and I never get to go, they’re so much fun! But I’m not needed. And that’s because they are sustainable in their current forms, there’s a sort of self perpetuating element where the volunteers for one gain experience and then they take the lead in another one.

And it needs people to step back as I have. And I believe you have as well. You haven’t been to a maths camp in years. When was the last time you were to maths camp? 

[00:08:26] Santiago: Last one I did was in 2016 in London, I think. 

[00:08:30] David: There you go. You see, I mean, you’re not quite at 10 years, but. 

[00:08:34] Santiago: However, there are, you know, Continually Evolving and Local Innovation. We have done things that are similar to maths camps or influenced by maths camps, like the 21st Century Skills course that we did in January 2020, just before the pandemic. That was inspired in many ways by the maths camp. 

[00:08:57] David: And I pointed to the ambassadors programme. I did do an ambassador’s training. That was then embedded in the next math camp. So the next math camp actually had the ambassador’s training as part of it. The 21st century skills, that was a wonderful innovation, if only COVID hadn’t happened, I think that could have really flourished, and it may still, you know, we just need to get the opportunities.

But those are the sort of local innovations which are happening. And it’s not surprising to me that Kenya has been the hub of those innovations. Ethiopia has as well, but they tend to be sort of very local there, it’s difficult to get the learning, it’s difficult to actually understand what’s happening because of the communication challenges.

[00:09:37] Santiago: Yes, and I’m looking through the list of principles, and there are several that we mentioned already, but there’s one that’s just jumping out on my face, that all the elements we mentioned are based around capacity building in some shape or form. 

[00:09:54] David: While I agree, learning is happening, capacity is being built through the maths camps, and this was how they were conceived, I think one of the things that the principles of the maths camps was that everybody learns. So it’s not your traditional capacity building, it’s very much a sort of mutual learning opportunity. 

I think this comes back to another one of our principles, which is the Collaborative by Nature. Our source of Collaborative by Nature, I would argue a lot of learning from that has come from some of these experiences like the maths camps, where we’ve seen how true collaboration is rather different. If you make that your heart, it really changes things.

[00:10:37] Santiago: And skip to another set of principles, Collaborative by Nature is within the Inherently Inclusive, which is something that we try to achieve as well, within maths camps by differentiating from standard maths camps in the sense that we’re not exclusive in our targeting. Standard maths camps are, or tend to target the top mathematicians already. 

[00:11:05] David: Ethiopia does. So Ethiopia in their math camp model from our approach, they found that the demand was so great within their environment, they needed a selection criteria that they thought was fair and equitable. And so they started recruiting top students as a reward. And this is very interesting, it went against some of our Inherently Inclusive principles, which weren’t established in the maths camp in that way, but we were wanting this diversity, this Embracing Diversity. 

We always designed our maths camp approach to work for students who like maths, who were already engaged, who enjoyed it, and for students who didn’t, who thought it was horrible, who just never engaged, to turn them around to change that. And some of our best stories have come from people who didn’t like maths and who were turned around by a maths camp, suddenly they realised, I can do this, this isn’t hard. 

Not only that, some said, I belong here at university, they weren’t going to go to university before. They then said, I belong, I can do this. Yeah, that element of Embracing Diversity, which is not in all the maths camps now, but it was part of that initial design. That was really important. 

[00:12:20] Santiago: But another principle jumps out: Options by Context. 

[00:12:26] David: Absolutely. And it’s exactly what we’re hearing. Each of these different camps has evolved in its own way because of its local context.

[00:12:34] Santiago: I’m wondering, and I know there was one, at least one paper written about the maths camps. Are we assessing this project? 

[00:12:46] David: It’s interesting you put that. I believe the whole Informed Decision Making, you know, we don’t have the evidence which really supports what’s happening in the maths camps. And there’s good reason because this was never a funded project, we’ve never had funding associated to this to actually evaluate what’s happening, how it’s happened. We know what’s happening because we see it, there’s a whole team which has grown around this, we know the people involved, we know what they’re doing. We hear the stories.

But the real critical assessment, we’ve not had that. We’ve not done it as research. We’ve not integrated research. This predates IDEMS, of course. And I think this is really important, of course, IDEMS was involved in the virtual math camp work. And that’s something where we could have built in research elements, of the evidence, elements of the assessment. But it was COVID and everything was crazy, so we didn’t really have the bandwidth to do that. 

But I would love that opportunity to flesh that out. And you’ve got to remember as well, from an IDEMS perspective, these last set of principles, the Informed Decision Making principles, you know, it’s really our team who has brought these out. These were the ones that were added. 

[00:14:00] Santiago: I was going to get to that. Those were added, the first four sets, I can read each one of the principles and say I think the maths camp influences in some shape or form. And I think that the maths camp experience really did influence the principles. Would you agree with that?

[00:14:24] David: I’d agree. I mean, the Enabling Opportunities, you know, this particular principle, a lot of that has been from sort of actually observing, it takes a 10 year period to create opportunities. You can have a one week intervention like a maths camp and it can change trajectories.

And so you need that combination of that long term view, as well as just that powerful intervention, that powerful event, which can change directions. You can’t do one or the other, and this is really central to our enabling opportunities, going beyond just equal opportunities to say, well, if we want to have the right people to choose from, we need to give them the right opportunities at the right point in time, so that they can gain the skills that are needed, and they can actually then be ready for the opportunities and succeed when they get them.

And so this idea of Enabling Opportunities is another one which I really think maths camp experiences and watching what people who went through them then went on to do and seeing how they progressed and seeing where they went and what they did and how that experience stayed with them and influenced them as they then went into life. That’s this element of enabling opportunities. 

[00:15:43] Santiago: But that doesn’t only apply to maths camp participants, it also applies to volunteers, organisers, teachers who took their students to the camps themselves. It applies to so many different people in different ways. 

[00:15:57] David: Yourself, in some sense, your involvement in IDEMS is, I would argue, directly attributable to the maths camps.

[00:16:05] Santiago: Of course, our relationship is directly attributable to the maths camps. 

[00:16:09] David: And you’re not alone. I mean, there are a number of other people in or around our team where the maths camps played such an important role in creating those connections, those partnerships, those collaborations. 

[00:16:22] Santiago: Well, Chris Clark, who we collaborate in so many different projects with and so closely with.

[00:16:27] David: Absolutely, but even just myself and Danny. You know, the co founders of IDEMS met at a maths camp.

[00:16:35] Santiago: And SAMI, that span out of the maths camps. 

[00:16:39] David: Exactly, that was created by the maths camps. It’s central to our DNA, and it’s interesting, as you say, just how many of these principles do relate very strongly back. What I would argue, one of the interesting ones which we’ve got is Holistic Interventions. And that’s something we’ve not mentioned before. 

And maths camps are very interesting for this. The maths camp was never designed for a single audience. It was always designed as a way to get people who were the core volunteers, learning and interacting and building those networks. The students, the participants, an experience which could be life changing. What it started with was my students, the local volunteers, to be exposed to people who they could aspire to and who could engage them intellectually. And to the international volunteers, a way to get them to engage and understand what they could do as part of these collaborations. 

So it was always this holistic intervention, which was never just about the students. And I think that’s one of the deepest insights that I had from the maths camp experience in those early days, was recognising that the real value was not in any individual actor. It was that holistic nature of the intervention. 

[00:18:07] Santiago: And of course you missed a group, which is the local teachers. 

[00:18:11] David: Well, I was including them in the volunteers, but you’re right. As a specific group, they’ve not always been there. They’ve sometimes been explicitly sort of singled out and given special treatment within the maths camps. Sometimes they’ve been more like participants. 

It’s been great to see these different ways that this sort of Local Innovation has led to different ways to engage teachers. And that was actually part of Zach’s original hypothesis. So just to come back to that, we had been doing lots of teacher trainings, and the uptake rates were low.

And his hypothesis was that the uptake rates were low partly because the teachers weren’t living it, they were just being taught. They needed to see the impact on the participants, on the children they were teaching. They needed to understand, and we got this, my favourite example was in Ethiopia, where we had these teachers who said, I finally understand student centred education, you know, the government ‘s been talking about this for years and then we’ve had all sorts of trainings. I never got it until I came to a maths camp and I saw it happening and I experienced it myself and I saw this is what I as an educator can be creating, these interactions, which leads to the student centered learning.

And it’s really interesting how that experiential learning, I think, has been so central. So you bringing up teachers is really important. 

[00:19:40] Santiago: Well, it certainly affected my teaching, while I was a teacher still, unfortunately I’m not in front of the classroom anymore at the moment. 

[00:19:48] David: We have senior professors now in the US who attribute their ability to go into and teach at you know, top US universities to their experience teaching maths camps and what learning how to educate in that context and how learning can happen. So it’s really interesting and that’s leading to all sorts of innovation in interesting ways. 

So yes, the volunteers, the international teachers, the international volunteers, what they gain from this, it’s incredible as well. And the lifelong friendships. I mean, that’s the other thing. And you mentioned us, but there’s sort of all sorts of people who I come across and I know separately, but then I realised, well, they actually know each other better than I know either of them because they went to maths camp together. And they know each other therefore, and they had that close bond was created in those two intensive weeks. 

[00:20:40] Santiago: I’m catching up with Franca on Saturday, who I met in a maths camp in 2013, I think. 

[00:20:49] David: And then she visited you in Argentina years ago, and all sorts. And so, you know, it’s just those friendship bonds that come out of it.

[00:20:57] Santiago: Can I ask you a final question? 

[00:20:59] David: Yes, of course. 

[00:21:00] Santiago: Transdisciplinary? 

[00:21:03] David: So this also relates to the everybody learns. Actually transdisciplinarity, that’s at the core. Now the difference of course is transdisciplinarity normally applies to scientific experts. And the maths camp scenario, this is maybe less relevant because it’s not all about experts, it’s not all about people who are disciplinary experts. But if you are a disciplinary expert, you are expected to be transdisciplinary. So we’ve had lawyers come in to a maths camp and engage and get their hands dirty, not as a lawyer, but thinking about how, you know, they can help good sessions be created.

And so, this is one where certainly this hasn’t come out of maths camps, but maths camps do have transdisciplinary elements to them when they’re implemented well. We take people who are experts, and we tell them, you know, you’re not here as an expert, you’re here to learn. That’s a fantastic trait for any transdisciplinary activity.

[00:22:06] Santiago: Okay, and to finish off, do you think there’s any other project that you’ve been involved with that has influenced the principles as much as this? 

[00:22:15] David: Yes, I mean, without a doubt, the biggest single project that’s influenced the principles is the Research Method Support that we’ve been giving in East and West Africa. A lot of the more formal elements of this, and even just the principles approach, can be traced back to that. I think the maths camps, this is something where, it’s not that the principles have come out of the maths camps, it’s that these principles are so well aligned with the maths camps because it’s just that natural evolution of what we’re trying to do.

This is the core of what we care about, what we want. And so of course it’s very aligned. But it’s aligned with the principles. The intellectual effort to actually go through and develop these principles didn’t come out of the maths camps because we never had the bandwidth to do that. 

I would love to have the opportunity to actually develop this. To think the maths camp approaches through as something really scalable, you know, reaching the millions of people across the world, because that’s what’s needed. But it’s a hard problem, and it’s a problem where we never had the bandwidth to do it. 

[00:23:31] Santiago: And hopefully at some point we will. 

[00:23:34] David: I hope so too, I expect we will. Whether we get funding to do it, which is what we would need right now, or whether we get big enough that we can fund doing it, it’ll happen. 

[00:23:46] Santiago: Well, David, it has been an absolute pleasure going through these principles with you. It was a huge learning experience for me. It helped me understand a lot of the principles much better. And of course, given that I’m one of the primary editors, any one that I didn’t discuss with you directly, I’m still learning from. Yeah, thank you. 

[00:24:12] David: Well, thank you. It’s been so powerful for me to be able to talk about these things in a way where these conversations have happened so naturally, but where we have got to the depth. I’ve really enjoyed that, so thank you, thank you for taking me on this journey as well.