228 – Reflections on the Joint Mathematics Meeting Part 1

[00:00:06] Santiago: Hello and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I am Santiago Borio an Impact Activation Fellow and I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:16] David: Hi Santiago. Looking forward to another discussion. What are we talking about today?

[00:00:21] Santiago: Well, you just came back from the JMM.

[00:00:26] David: The Joint Maths Meetings, in the US. This was quite an experience, my first time there.

[00:00:31] Santiago: And it’s quite a big mathematical event, isn’t it?

[00:00:36] David: It’s potentially the biggest in the world, it certainly competes with the IMU’s big event and, it was really fascinating.

[00:00:44] Santiago: IMU is?

[00:00:46] David: The International Mathematics Union. They hand out the Fields Medal, the biggest event not in terms of numbers. The JMM is actually bigger in terms of numbers. It’s an incredible event. It’s the Joint Meeting of the American Maths Associations, all of them. And it’s a really impressive event.

[00:01:03] Santiago: And is that for mathematics at university level or throughout?

[00:01:11] David: All levels. It is of course led by, if you want, the university level professors, but it is for all levels of mathematics, teaching as well as research.

[00:01:22] Santiago: And of course, I’m interested in education. Does it have a strand on education or something like that?

[00:01:28] David: Many strands on education, a whole set of sections, it has also an exhibition, it’s got events which are designed to attract school children so some school children come. No, it’s a really impressive event. It’s not like the Maths Fest, which is focused on that school level engagement with students, but it does include elements of that as part of the whole.

[00:01:52] Santiago: I see. Why did you go?

[00:01:55] David: It was originally an invitation to present at WeBWork’s 30th anniversary representing the STACK community. And that was the opportunity that I decided was worth the event. But I was then invited to another group who were doing compassionate mathematics around collaboration in mathematics, which was really interesting as well.

And of course this was a great opportunity to meet the community that is engaged in, I suppose, the underlying mathematics that we’ve been struggling with, this applied category theory, that community was there as well. So there were many different communities that I met through the event, and it was really valuable in each case to engage in a way that I’ve never done before on the American side of this.

I’ve been involved in the international side before, maybe bits in the European side. But the American side was very new to me and it was really interesting.

[00:02:55] Santiago: And you said you were invited to give one talk, I believe you submitted quite a few proposals. 

[00:03:03] David: So I ended up giving six and Juma gave two. A colleague who couldn’t attend, I gave a couple on behalf of colleagues who couldn’t attend because of visa issues. That meant I got to actually meet these different communities and engage with them. So I was actually invited to give, I think, three different talks, and then added another three.

[00:03:25] Santiago: Wow, that’s quite a lot for a three day event, if I’m not mistaken.

[00:03:29] David: It was four days, but yes, it was a busy four days.

[00:03:33] Santiago: Tell me a bit about your experience there. 

[00:03:36] David: It’s the first time I’ve really engaged in the American mathematics organisations, and I was really surprised, well, my first pleasant surprise was that I was expecting not to know anyone and I didn’t have a talk in the first few days, so I was just going and attending talks, and there was a session about mathematics in the international context.

And so I decided I should drop in on that session and see what they were discussing, and found out, of course, that I knew half the speakers, and actually these were the people who have been engaging in AIMS, in other forms of work in the African context. And then a number of other things that I didn’t know about.

But of course, many of the American mathematicians working in Africa with the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences or other partners, I had met.

[00:04:29] Santiago: Yes, I was gonna clarify, AIMS is a African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, they have institutes in several African countries.

[00:04:38] David: They started in South Africa, there were people there who I’d met in Ghana, there was people I’d met in Tanzania before the Tanzanian centre shut down. There were also centres in Senegal, Cameroon, and Rwanda.

[00:04:51] Santiago: And they have a format, which is quite interesting for their degree programs where they have invited lecturers from all over the place.

[00:05:02] David: Exactly. And this is where there were a number of people who I had met while they were teaching at AIMS and either I was teaching at AIMS, I was working at AIMS for a year and I met some of them then, or I was visiting AIMS for other reasons. Actually what was quite fun is some of them actually got photos up and sort of, this is when we met in 2013. So it was really, that was really nice to be reminded of some of these, well, these early days for me, if you want, in engaging with that international community.

[00:05:36] Santiago: So you actually appeared in photos from presentations from other people.

[00:05:41] David: I did. It was a really interesting session, but it was a session where, actually, in the audience, I was one of the people who was quite well informed about everything that was there. It was a very interesting session, it was something I could contribute to, which was nice and surprising to me.

And it was very interesting that that session, it helped me to recognise that, you know, here was the biggest, in terms of number of people, maths event in the world potentially, and yet I left that session recognising actually they’re quite isolated. There’s only a few people who have got these little bits of experience and they haven’t got deep experience in some of these international collaborations.

So there’s sort of ways in which, although it’s such a big event, it’s actually isolated from some of the experiences that I’ve had and the things that I know, and that there are really these opportunities for better collaboration and integration.

Just a very simple example of something which I recognised they could benefit from, but the London Maths Society had this mentoring African research and mathematics program a number of years ago, and they’re in the process of thinking about similar things but hadn’t even heard of it. And so just being able to mention, there was this program from the London Maths Society, which you could actually learn from is something which I think, you know, these could be really useful to build those connections because there are different people working in this space, in isolation.

[00:07:09] Santiago: And, as we said in previous episodes, we work very well as bridges between organisations and people.

[00:07:19] David: Absolutely. This is very much what was reinforced in some sense, this need for bridge building across and within. I don’t know what bridges will get built from this, but I did feel that there is potentially a role for me and for us more generally to play. It was really interesting to think that and to delve into a new challenge because the needs are very different.

And the other thing that was very interesting once I got into the education sessions was that, actually, they’re very focused on American education. And I’d always sort of assumed and felt that the challenges in American education are relatively, they’re not the same sort of levels of complexity as the challenges in the low resource environments that we work.

But I now recognise I was wrong there. Some of the challenges facing the American education system, they’re really interesting, they’re not necessarily resource bound in the same way, but they do have really interesting limiting factors, which are different and interesting to engage in.

[00:08:22] Santiago: Can you give an example?

[00:08:24] David: Well, one of the ones that I loved, and there’s a group who does some really amazing work on this thing called Project Ember, where, actually, there’s a lot of isolation at the university level education. Particularly the big prestigious research universities don’t collaborate on their teaching and learning, and therefore each one is in some sense reinventing the wheel in different ways. They haven’t in the past been learning from each other.

And that’s what this Project Ember is actually stepping in to do. It’s a very interesting set of people behind it doing some really powerful work with the teaching focused faculty. And so one of the problems in some of these very powerful research institutions is that the mathematics departments have very heavy teaching loads for other departments. And therefore they have staff who are teaching focused and who therefore aren’t research focused and are not part of what is visibly important in the department, but they are an important part of the department’s role in the university.

And the politics that come into that are very interesting and leading some really interesting challenges as the learnings about how to actually teach better in these environments, there’s more and more known about how to do this, there’s good evidence. And the evidence that they were articulating is exactly the similar sort of things that we are used to, but very well framed.

And of course, mastery is at the heart of this. It’s one of their five key points. But the thing which was so interesting is that that need to collaborate across the institutions and the fact that there’s limitations in doing so because of the nature of the competition between these institutions was really fascinating to start engaging in, start thinking about, and really just being aware of, yes, they have some amazing people doing amazing work, but often in isolation because of the sort of structures of competition.

[00:10:36] Santiago: Sorry, I don’t see the direct link with the low resource environment.

[00:10:41] David: So it’s not the direct link with a low resource environment because it is a very high resource environment, especially these research institutions. But the thing which is so interesting is that the nature of the problems and the complexity of actually engaging and getting things to work, and the importance of actually support in the same way that we give support in the low resource environment.

There is this need for support to cut across and collaborate, create some of those links and collaborations in the high resource environments. And so that’s sort of where the parallels are striking, but what’s really interesting is that the nature of the challenge is no less than the challenge that we are facing in really low resource environments. And that’s what I found stimulating.

[00:11:29] Santiago: And of course we are giving that type of support in a prestigious university in the US.

[00:11:36] David: Yes. But, I guess, the way we had started doing that and the way we were thinking about that was, again, very much in isolation for that single institution. Whereas what I’m learning from this Project Ember, is that the key, what’s really needed is this collaborative network so that the good teaching and learning practices can spread from one institution to another despite the competition between institutions.

And that’s a really interesting challenge to try and sort of, how do you square that circle? The institutions are inherently competing with one another, but they would be much better off if they collaborated on elements of the education. And so that competition versus collaboration, oh, what a wonderful problem and challenge to get engaged in.

[00:12:27] Santiago: Yeah, and we have a lot of learnings from those sort of collaborations in the African context, particularly in Kenyan universities.

[00:12:34] David: Yeah, well, but again, it’s very different and I think what I’m really appreciating is just what an interesting set of challenges there are because it’s a well-defined, multi-layered problem because of the sort of nature of American universities, and there’s so many of them down to the community colleges. And each of them has a different dynamic.

You have your small liberal arts colleges who have a very different dynamic from your big research institutions, from your community colleges, your state colleges, your state universities and so on. And so, the nature of the competition and collaboration that’s possible between and across the institutions, is really, well, it is just a complex problem. I like complex problems.

[00:13:20] Santiago: Of course you do. Now tell me a bit about your talks. 

[00:13:25] David: Maybe I should start with the WeBWork session because that was a wonderful session, I really enjoyed that. So WeBWork is a mathematics assessment sort of system, we discussed STACK in the past, WeBWork is similar, it has an amazing community behind it, used in many, particularly, American universities.

And the way I like to think of it is that it’s not just a question type like STACK, it also does the quiz and it’s sort of elements of the student management as well.

[00:13:57] Santiago: And this is one of the odd cases where there is a lot of collaboration within or across institutions because there’s, if I’m not mistaken, huge question banks of open resources that loads and loads of people contribute to from different contexts.

[00:14:15] David: Well, the way collaboration has been built up in these systems is around open educational resources. And WebWork is a fantastic example of an open educational system with an open educational resource bank managed by a community and serving the community, and a really strong community behind it as well.

And it’s transitioned from being, if you want, driven by an individual to now very much a community led project, it’s a good, stable open source system. But it is, and this is why it was so interesting to be there now, it is, in some sense, under threat because of AI, as is everything.

The impact of AI on the education system in general, and the importance of deterministic systems within this is part of what I spoke about. So I gave a talk related to AI and electronic assessment for maths, that was one of my talks. I actually gave that one on behalf of a PhD student, originally from Benin, but currently in Italy, who unfortunately couldn’t travel for visa issues.

The work that he’s doing and the broader framing that I was able to add about leveraging AI, but keeping these deterministic systems like STACK or WeBWork at the core of electronic assessment is an opportunity that I think is not widely recognised, and I think was appreciated by this audience who are looking for, well, how do we move forward? What do we do as a community? How do we adapt in the future? And so that was part of what was in that discussion.

[00:16:00] Santiago: Great. And the other talks?

[00:16:05] David: There was a talk also about the support approach that we’ve been using in the Kenyan context for STACK and discussing how this is actually very similar to what I had then been learning about. I changed that talk quite considerably based on hearing about Project Ember.

And so I was able to tie it into Project Ember and explain how these things actually complemented each other, and the importance of this. And actually advocating for the fact that in the US Project Ember’s talking about teaching focus faculty. And I was saying, well, what we’ve sort of been looking at in the Kenyan context and beyond is the need for this assessment focused faculty, people who really specialise, become assessment specialists, with these electronic assessment systems.

[00:16:46] Santiago: And of course when you say assessment it’s not necessarily summative assessment, it’s not necessarily tests, it’s mastery as well, content presentation, and the five quiz framework that we presented in previous episodes. 

[00:17:00] David: This is where it’s very interesting. Again, Project Ember has some really interesting evidence around this. I mentioned that one of their five key areas was the mastery component, formative assessment. But another one of their key areas is just in time prerequisites.

So there’s actually interesting issues with a number of universities, about people coming in without necessarily all the prerequisites they need for certain courses. And there has been a lot of research evidence which has shown that the most effective way to support them and to engage them is to do what they call just in time prerequisites, which is very much like your prerequisite quiz as part of our five quiz model.

So this is something which is really interesting to see the research evidence behind this, in a totally different context from the one that I know well. But again, the same basic principles.

[00:17:52] Santiago: Great. That is very promising for our framework.

[00:17:58] David: Yeah. Well, and it’s something where, if you think of the five major things they have, those are the two which were really relevant to the assessment piece. The others are very much about the fact that you need to be coordinating large classes in systematic ways, and there’s good evidence for that and that that helps student learning and improves results in these large institutions.

I believe, another one was about engaging the management structures in what you’re doing. So actually having the buy-in from upper management and how you do that institutional buy-in if you want. 

[00:18:35] Santiago: So they have a more holistic mindset. We are much more focused on content delivery and learning.

[00:18:45] David: Well, Project Ember is trying to actually engage in this to basically reduce the maths failure rates. The statistics that they pulled out were the fact that, you know, I think it was four out of the top five, or maybe it’s five out of the top six failure rates are all in mathematical courses, which is not a good thing. I think there was a chemistry course that was sort of ranked number four or something.

[00:19:11] Santiago: And this in line with the findings that we had in Kenya.

[00:19:15] David: Absolutely. This is the same all over the world, this is what we’ve observed all over the world. And somehow it’s deemed acceptable, which I don’t agree with. It shouldn’t be, mathematics shouldn’t be the course that people fail. It shouldn’t be that barrier.

And actually this is one of the things that was discussed in the Compassionate Mathematics sessions. That was a whole day again, and there I gave a talk about collaboration, where I actually really, again, I threw out the slides I was going to use and did a rather interactive session. I did a talk based on six words, I had the title and then the whole talk was based on just six words.

And that really came because as I was reflecting about this, the thing which sort of jumped out was as mathematicians and everyone at the conference, we’re mathematicians, you know, we are naturally competitive. And that was so visible at the conference, the competitiveness was just, you could feel it. And so I actually changed my talk so that I started with competition.

And actually this was appreciated, that in the audience there was this sort of feeling that we want to be compassionate, we want to draw others in, but will that change maths from what we’ve learned. We as mathematicians, we were good at it and we competed and we won. And that was always part of the attraction in some sense.

And to not recognise that, to not actually be able to imagine what would a totally different mathematics look like, which wasn’t competitive and which didn’t lose 90, 95, 99% of people along the way.

[00:20:57] Santiago: Yeah, that is, I think, a structural, or a systemic problem from early years mathematics that goes all the way across, and there’s a social element of it as well, people saying maths is hard, maths is not needed because you can do all of it with tools and so on and so forth.

[00:21:24] David: Those are two separate things. But I think the thing which I actually drew out and the thing I hadn’t actually really engaged with as much before, and it led to a very interesting talk and discussion, but the thought experiment I posed them is what would our societies look like if 95% of our population or more had high levels of mathematical literacy?

If we had a really good education system, which like the fact that almost everyone can read and write and communicate in these ways, what if almost everyone could communicate mathematically and spoke the language of mathematics to a high level? What would society look like and what would it look like to actually have a mathematics curriculum, which was designed not to differentiate students but to actually get them speaking the language of mathematics.

I didn’t answer that question of course, but I think it would look very different, because the whole of our personal experience as mathematicians is to have been challenged, it’s problem solving. You talk to mathematicians, it’s puzzles, it’s problem solving. But that’s not the language of mathematics. That’s just how we were taught mathematics. It’s what we love. We love problem solving, but you’re not gonna get 95% of the population by having this competitive problem solving puzzle approach. What would it look like to actually think of mathematics totally differently?

I of course said more than that. We could do a whole nother episode on this. But it was a very, very thought provoking and interactive session. It was one of the more interactive talks I gave.

[00:23:06] Santiago: And what you were just saying resonates quite strongly with competency-based curriculums that we are working on in African contexts.

[00:23:17] David: Well, this was always part of the vision of competency-based curriculums, it is part of what we’d hope. But I believe that the nature of those mathematical competencies is not necessarily what could be the right target if we wanted that mathematically literate population. And don’t get me wrong, I think there’s been a lot of good work on the competency-based curriculums. But I’m not sure anyone knows exactly what it would look like if we were to really engage with this more deeply.

Anyway, so yeah, happy to have another discussion around this because I must admit that being, I was challenged by that talk in the sense that what I thought I was going to give and what I actually gave as a talk were two very different things, partly because of the environment.

And that environment reminded me how central competition is because it was there visibly in that environment, and also how much I like it myself. To talk about collaborative maths without recognising the fact that part of what I liked about mathematics was that I was good at it and I could compete, you know, I won maths competitions. It would have been incorrect to talk about mathematics as a collaborative venture, which is what I was trying to talk about without recognising that fact.

[00:24:45] Santiago: Of course. And there are a lot of competitions that actually could have detrimental effects on students who perhaps don’t qualify or whatever reason, or fail, or don’t do well, anyway. 

[00:25:04] David: One more set of talks that I gave.

[00:25:06] Santiago: No, no, for the sake of time, we discussed some of your talks and I still want to hear highlights or other interesting talks that you attended. So let’s make this part one of two and have a second episode where you finish describing your talks and highlight your, perhaps the gemstone. 

[00:25:31] David: Absolutely. Happy to do that, there’s a lot, it’s still fresh and I’m really quite excited. I guess I would like to thank the Joint Mathematics Meeting led by the American Mathematics Society and the Mathematics Association of America, and all the other associations that hosted it. It was an incredible event and I really appreciated the opportunity to be there.

[00:25:54] Santiago: Right. Well, I look forward to continuing this discussion.

[00:25:58] David: Thank you.