In February 2024, the RGME group held a working group session at the annual conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education. Here are the slides used during the session: Google Slides Link. h We framed this working group with the following guiding questions:
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Katy Ohsiek (Portland Community College) This arts-based autoethnography explores the experience of a graduate student of mathematics at a mid-sized research university through a collection of collage, songwriting, and personal essays. This research identifies issues in the mathematics academic pipeline associated with gender, burnout culture, perfectionism, mental health, qualifying exams, and isolation. The present research is synthesized with existing research on doctoral attrition. Possible positive futures of graduate education in mathematics are discussed.
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Rox-Anne L'Italien-Bruneau (University of Auckland, New Zealand) My doctoral research is concerned with the transition from undergraduate mathematics to research mathematics. I am particularly interested in students’ experiences in settings contributing to their participation in research mathematics such as reading groups, seminars, meetings with advisors and conferences. I wish to investigate the different stages of the transition, the expectations set for students and how students adapt to meet them, and the kind of support offered by departments and supervisors. In other words, my aim is to characterise the processes and structures underlying the transition to research mathematics in graduate mathematics.
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Royce Olarte (University of California, Santa Barbara) Broadening the participation of underrepresented graduate students and supporting their transition to the mathematics professoriate are growing concerns for higher education institutions. I will report on my dissertation work examining how mathematics graduate students are socialized into the professoriate, and how their professional identities as prospective mathematics faculty develop during graduate school. I will highlight different qualitative methods used to engage participants in self-reflection of their experiences and will present findings on graduate students’ professional identity development, supports and barriers they experienced during graduate education, and their mental models of mathematics teaching.
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Scott Courtney (Kent State University) & Anita Alexander (Bilkent University, Turkey) This study investigated how doctoral programs in mathematics education across the globe prepare students for research and teaching in mathematics education; how doctoral programs provide academic research and writing support; and what doctoral students view as missing from their experiences. Online surveys, along with follow-up interviews from a subset of survey respondents, indicated that doctoral students from 17 different countries stressed the importance of international collaboration, examining fundamental theories of learning mathematics, and identified a need for more support with academic writing. The survey, for both individuals with or working toward a doctorate in mathematics education, is still active and available at https://tinyurl.com/DocMathEd.
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Shanna Dobson (University of California, Riverside) In this talk, we open a conversation about the graduate experience of students who identify as creatives and/ or intuitives, citing the canonical classification of mathematicians as problem solvers or theory builders. Grothendieck, a profound theory builder, famously spoke of “the creative act as the archetypal act of the human spirit.” Many creative and intuitive students are so inspired, and are pursuing mathematical knowledge for more personal reasons, such as exploring universality, beauty, Truth, and/or worldbuilding. We believe that, in addition to being technically trained, nurturing and polishing the space of creativity, intuition, exposition, and reflection, is crucial to being prepared for research. Afterall, Charles Pierce stated that “it is necessary to experiment in the imagination upon the image of the premise in order from the result of such experiment to make corollarial deductions to the truth of the conclusion.” We posit a few ideas of how the learning needs of creatives and intuitives could be nurtured, give a few examples of mathart, and discuss the possible ways to authentically assess a theory builder. We conclude with a discussion of how to create spaces featuring such multimodal learning. My work seeks to understand the quality of creatives’ experiences and the agentic choices they make as they navigate contexts where their lack of representation is a common narrative.
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Jeff Shih (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) The NSF-funded Third National Conference on Doctoral Programs in Mathematics Education took place in October, 2022 in Las Vegas. I will share the impetus for the conference, what happened during the conference, and what is happening now as a result of the conference.
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Scott Wolpert (University of Maryland & Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics) There is a wealth of information publicly available on undergraduate and graduate programs. All schools with Federal funding are required to report on their programs to the Dept of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Example information on applicants, demographics and degree counts will be presented. Time permitting, a demo of accessing information will be given.
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Ben Braun (University of Kentucky) What would it look like to have PhD programs in the mathematical sciences that are focused primarily on supporting student learning rather than on measuring student achievement?
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Eric Cordero-Siy (Boston University) There are days I want to bury my head in the sand--you probably do too. In a brief conversation, we'll consider how academia is driven by money and exploitation, harming mental health and social justice, while cloaking itself in "the pursuit of knowledge." We'll reflect on historic movements that fought back against the academic grind machine. We'll set our focus on the future, imagining a world where it is possible to do the work we want to do while making sure those in power rage against the real enemy.
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Brady Tyburski (Michigan State University) & Aida Alibek (University of Georgia) A majority of published scholarship in graduate mathematics education is authored by senior scholars. As a result, there is a noticeable lack of detailed graduate student perspectives in research on graduate mathematics education. Yet, graduate perspectives are essential if we hope to make progress in creating humanizing and holistically supportive graduate curricular spaces for all. In this talk, we highlight examples of scholarship authored by graduate students to show what is possible, and then issue a clarion call for further studies that radically center graduate student perspectives and/or include graduate students as (co-)researchers.