When she transferred as a junior to CSUF in Spring 2020, Evelyn Pohle walked into her differential equations and algebra class and her male professor mentioned how there were several female instructors who taught math.

And women of color, to boot.

The concept was new to Pohle, who attended Trabuco Hills High School and spent two years at Saddleback College.

“I was like, whoa!” she recalled.

That experience inspired Pohle, who always wanted to be a teacher, to pursue a career as a high school math instructor.

And it’s a moment that highlights the aim of a recently awarded grant to the Department of Mathematics to address longstanding issues of equity gaps in the classroom by having instructors focus on so-called “active teaching” methods instead of traditional lecturing.

From left, principal investigator Alison Marzocchi, Kristin Kurianski, Amelia Stone-Johnstone, and Roberto Soto of the mathematics department were awarded $297,118 from the National Science Foundation for a three-year project titled META: Mathematics Equity through Teaching Actively. (Photo courtesy of Alison Marzocchi)

The National Science Foundation’s three-year grant of just under $300,000, which kicked in Feb. 1, will allow the math department to research and implement a professional development program for faculty to adopt an active learning in mathematics, or ALM, approach with a deliberate focus on equitable instruction.

The ALM approach, which has students actively working on math problems in class instead of just watching their teacher explain and work out equations, has the potential to reduce long-standing equity gaps across racial/ethnic and gender lines in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, according to the four math professors who serve as co-investigators on Project META: Mathematics Equity through Teaching Actively.

“Research on how equity intersects with the active learning approach to teaching has come out in the last two years, and we’ve been on top of it,” said Alison Marzocchi, associate professor in the Department of Mathematics. “We’re on the front lines of researching faculty professional development to support them on strategies to teach in an equity-minded, active learning approach.”

Kristin Kurianski, Amelia Stone-Johnstone and Roberto Soto are the other math professors working to transform undergraduate mathematics teaching at CSUF.

“We’re asking our instructors to get out of their comfort zone,” said Soto, adding that a sizable number of CSUF’s 90-some math instructors already have bought into the new approach. “We’d like to get all of them involved.”

And students like Pohle are helping.

She leads a group of six undergraduate mathematics majors — the others are Carolynn Cao, Michael Filice, Sarah Jung, Cedar Hofstetter, and Olga Luna Flores — who meet one-on-one with faculty to engage them in observation cycles that promote self-reflection and goal setting by using what’s known as the TEAM Tool, for Teaching Equity-minded and Active Mathematics.

The idea is to get math faculty to gradually improve their instruction by participating in immersive professional development and reflecting on their instruction in supportive learning communities. Pohle and other students relayed to the META faculty how impactful it was for them to learn about examples of diverse mathematicians. Within the next few weeks, a group of about a dozen CSUF math faculty got together under project META to create PowerPoint slides of diverse mathematicians that could be used in classes.

Recognizing the need

Marzocchi and Soto both joined CSUF at the same time in 2015. They are former high school math teachers who recognized the need for math classrooms to be more equitable for students, and they knew that part of the answer was having active classrooms.

They collaborated and worked on a smaller grant before the NSF awarded them the larger grant this year.

“Our approach was to start with faculty,” Soto said. “It’s hard for us to change — especially if we’ve never seen what we’re asking people to do.”

Research shows that most college STEM students start to drop out of the major during the first two semesters of calculus. The META professors are seeking to eliminate this trend.

“Either students don’t do well in class, or they feel they don’t belong,” Kurianski explained. “If math stereotypes get reinforced, that’s what happens.”

The META team currently is focusing on how to support math faculty during this transformation.

And Pohle is thrilled to be part of the research and program implementation. Getting involved in a research project with faculty is very uncommon as an undergraduate.

“Evelyn is super bright,” Marzocchi said. “She’s very organized, and she’s thoughtful. She asks great questions and never accepts anything as truth. She wants to think very deeply about things and understand them very well, which is an excellent quality for a researcher.”

Pohle, the recipient of the Mathematics Department’s 2022 Special Recognition for Undergraduate Research Award and the Outstanding Understand Student Scholarly Creative Activities and Research Award for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, said she wants to “change the narrative” about math professors and instruction.

“Growing up,” she said, “I didn’t know of any female mathematicians.”

She added: “I’m super excited that I’ve had the opportunity to look at this as an undergraduate student because now it’s something that I can’t unsee. When I start teaching, I feel like I’m going to be constantly thinking about these things.”

Related Articles