IBL Blog Playlist (updated)

A really short post...  I've kept playlist of IBL blog posts organized by topic. Posts go back to 2011, and the idea behind the playlist is to help people find some of the more popular posts, instead of having to dig around. Here's the link:  The IBL Blog playlist.  Take care!

Owning IBL History

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.   - James Baldwin

History can be viewed as inconvenient, and we can try and ignore it or hide it, and thus be trapped by it. But embracing our history and its lessons is in my view a healthy step in the long, meandering journey towards a better society.

The IBL movement in college mathematics in America has some roots with R. L. Moore. Moore was a sexist and racist, and this is well documented. This post is not about his teaching. This post is about the present day state of the IBL movement as unequivocally a movement for social justice in math education, and the history of how we arrived here. 

Let's be clear. The Moore method is not IBL. One of the four pillars of IBL is instructor focus on equity. Today in 2020, we value people from all backgrounds, and our teaching must reflect this. When RLM prevented black students and women from enrolling in a class, he was being a gatekeeper via overt acts of bias. That was obviously wrong, it's part of our profession's history, and it is why we do not include Moore method in IBL.

For many years starting in the mid 2000s, effort and thinking went into trying to expand the definition of IBL in order to move forward. At one point in time, group work was not considered acceptable by some (not me) who promoted the Moore method. I remember clearly after giving a talk, fielding comments about the problems of group work and how it was not Moore method...  Many of us, however, understood that we could not move forward with a binary choice between (a) Moore method and (b) lecture. There must exist a broader definition of IBL methods, and hence the idea by Sandra Laursen to use the "big tent IBL" phrase to be more inclusive of different viewpoints and implementation of active, student-centered teaching. We needed to expand on multiple levels to get more people feel welcome. 

What's common in the big tent? The four pillars of IBL or IBME are "student engagement in meaningful mathematics, student collaboration for sense-making, instructor inquiry into student thinking, and equitable instructional practice to include all in rigorous mathematical learning and mathematical identity-building." (Laursen and Rasmussen 2019 Link)

In 2015,  Dave Kung, St. Mary's College of Maryland was invited to speak at the IBL conference. Dave and I (and others) discussed the issue of the problem of RLM's racism and how that was negatively impacting our ability to move forward. I expressed to Dave my support to address the issue of changing the name of the conference, because I felt then and as I do now that it was the right thing to do. 

Below is a short excerpt from Dave's talk. 

One of the things the IBL community needs to do is to drop the RL Moore name from this conference... As hard as that is for many people, there's a community out there which will never come to this conference, which will never attend the R. L. Moore conference, but they will attend the IBL conference.     - Dave Kung

Some of us spoke truth to power during that time to change the name and to do more for social justice issues in math education and the IBL community.  Some of us, myself included, paid a personal and professional price for it, but it was worth it.  

The history of math education sadly includes things we are not proud of, which is not surprising given that teaching is part of our society. The question is what is our responsibility?  It's clearly not to hide or whitewash history or to merely change a name and move on. We need to do things that make society better.

In the aftermath of that period of time, some in the IBL community worked intentionally on justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI). The equity pillar was added to the pillars of IBL so that the definition of IBL includes an instructor focus on equity.  

We implemented a "ground game" to recruit math instructors from minority serving institutions, instructors of color, and women to IBL workshops. We did this so that high-impact teaching practices would reach more students from minoritized groups, which research strongly suggests can be beneficial to them. 

It needs to be said; the joke is on RLM. Good implementation of IBL levels the playing field for women and people of color. This is classic irony, where the person trying to exclude women and black students from his teaching, ultimately contributes to creating teaching methods that have pulled up the people he was trying to keep down. We have pulled up by orders of magnitude more women and people of color than he excluded in his lifetime.

The double irony in this story is those who reject IBL methods in favor of teacher-centered instruction, because of RLM's racism and sexism. Education research suggests strongly that teacher-centered instruction leads to women and minorities leaving the STEM pipeline. Thus, those clinging to teacher-centered methods in effect are maintaining the status quo, which was RLM's goal. This is why we need science and humanity to sort through the messy data and social constructs. (Theobald et al 2020)

Anyways moving on, facilitators involved in the NSF PRODUCT workshops during the past 3 years engaged in diversity training, and we implemented sessions on equitable teaching practices at our recent summer workshops. These sessions have had an impact on participants, and more instructors in college math now know about ways to teach equitably, and we have the ability to offer professional development in equitable teaching practices today in college math, which wasn't a capability we had in the past.

I created a self-paced workshop for college math instructors interested in starting the process of learning more about race in America (Link to The Beloved Community and Teaching self-paced workshop). This introduction to race in America is based on a longer list of videos posted here on the AIBL webpage (Link). Connected to this is the love, empathy, respect movement to re-humanize education, especially during a pandemic (Link), and we are making progress in assessment by incorporating equitable, bias-resistant strategies, such as mastery-based grading (Link). 

In the aftermath of the protests following the murder of George Floyd, I wrote a statement posted on the AIBL website. 

Statement on Equity and Black Lives Matter: AIBL is an organization that works toward equity, inclusion, and dismantling systemic racism in education.  AIBL strives to dismantle systemic racism via modernizing teaching via the 4 pillars of IBL. AIBL believes fundamentally in equity, inclusion, and promoting women and people of color in the Mathematical Sciences.  We believe black lives matter, and we commit to specifically support the black community in Mathematics.  While we acknowledge that some modern day teaching methods are rooted in the teaching methods of R.L. Moore, AIBL explicitly states that the Moore Method is not IBL.  We explicitly make this distinction due to Moore’s well-documented racism. 

Some have argued that we should change the name of the movement yet again. IBL = MM to some still, so it's tainted. I understand this feeling and I fully get why people would want to do this. This why I am sharing some of the history, so that people are informed about the efforts and battles of the past that bring us to the present day. My sense from all this is that embracing history is the way forward.

Embracing history to me means that we are honest about the mistakes we have made in our profession, and then work to fix these issues. We dropped RLM's name, and did several things listed above to start to move the needle. And we have more work to do obviously.

Dignity also matters. Everyone deserves to live and work with dignity. I understand this personally as member of the Japanese American community, where some of people I knew growing up were forced into concentration camps during World War 2.  Thus, I apologize to all affected when RLM's name was attached to the conference and other events in the past. I apologize to black mathematicians, who feel unwelcome in the IBL community, because a known racist was held up, while your concerns about racism were being downplayed and dismissed. More of us should have listened and done more.

One of my personal goals as an educator is to help build a coalition of people, that joins together in fellowship to do JEDI work in math. I know I won't be perfect and I will make mistakes.  I also know that I will own up to my mistakes, and continue to work with the shokunin spirit, guided by my principals, where everyday I will try my best to contribute positively to our community. 

Additional Links:

• Dave Kung's slides for his 2015 plenary are posted here. The full talk is here.
• CU Boulder E&ER (Laursen, Haberler, Hayward) has a page here, devoted to "studying how people, structures, and ideas are important to the past development, current growth, and future sustainability of an educational community that promotes inquiry-based learning in college mathematics."