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1. Project adelante: An anti-deficit professional development program for university mathematics instructors

   Adiredja, Aditya; Civil, Marta; Jarnutowski, Becca (October 2024, RUME Proceedings)

   Cook, S; Katz, B; Moore-Russo, D (Ed.)

   In this report, we share the design of a year-long professional development program for university math instructors that we developed and refined as the Anti-deficit Learning and Teaching Project (Adelante). The program is a community learning project wherein minoritized students, STEM peer mentors, and math instructors (graduate students and instructional faculty) build relationships as they share their knowledge and experiences with race, gender, and mathematics. Culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billing, 1995) frames the goals of the community learning in terms of deep mathematical knowledge, cultural knowledge, and sociopolitical consciousness. The program activities are inspired by the Funds of Knowledge for Teaching project (Moll et al., 1992) wherein teachers are offered opportunities to build meaningful relationships with students and their communities. An anti-deficit perspective (Adiredja et al., 2020) guides the learning experience for all participants. Not only are minoritized students assumed to have cultural and intellectual assets for learning, but the project also aims to dismantle deficit master narratives (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) about these students and their capacity to learn. Instructors worked on explicitly challenging deficit narratives about their students as they engaged in the program’s activities. The project also takes an anti-deficit approach to instructor development, focusing on their individual growth and agency, joy in teaching, and mental health. We also position ourselves as learners to the experience and wisdom of the staff and students at the university cultural centers. The core activities for the PD engage teachers to: (a) participate in five PD meetings on anti- deficit teaching and Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) teaching method; (b) lead a five-day math summer bridge workshop in Pre-Calculus, Calculus I, II, Vector Calculus, or Linear Algebra immediately following the meetings; (c) participate in critical conversations about race and gender in STEM with students at the cultural centers; (d) conduct a semi-structure interview with one of their students from the summer workshop about their STEM experience; and (e) participate in group reflection meetings debriefing their experience in the activities. Preliminary analysis of two of the three cohorts of participants found that most instructors developed a more humanizing approach to their teaching and their students (Gutiérrez, 2018). IBL helped instructors to explicitly challenge deficit narratives about minoritized students in the classroom, wherein most observed their students engaging in deep mathematical reasoning. Interviewing one of their students also shifted deficit narratives that developed in the classroom for some instructors. The workshop served as a space to try out previously learned teaching ideas (student centered teaching) without constraints from curriculum and assessments. Doing so reinvigorated many instructors’ passion for teaching, especially those who are more experienced. 

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2. Returning to disrupting deficit narratives: Funds of knowledge beyond curriculum

   Adiredja, Aditya; Civil, Marta (October 2023, University of Nevada, Reno)

   Lamberg, T; Moss, D (Ed.)

   We examine the potential for instructor-led student interview in disrupting narratives about minoritized university students and their families. This approach was inspired by a critical component of the original Funds of Knowledge for Teaching project (FoK), the home visit, which involved ethnographic interviews with students and their family to learn about their lives. Study group reflections with project teachers and researchers led to the teachers’ examination of biases and disruption of deficit stories about students and their families (Tenery, 2005). Two frameworks guided the design and the analysis of the study. The anti-deficit framework for students from minoritized groups (Adiredja, 2019) prioritizes unpacking students’ existing understandings and resources for learning, and explicitly constructing counter-stories about students and their mathematics. The study also interprets the results of the study from a socioecological perspective (Louie & Zhan, 2022). Story construction is attributed to the individual, the learning community they are in, and the broader societal context. The data comes from a larger project focusing on engaging university instructors in community learning project focusing on race, gender, and mathematics (NSF DUE 2021313 IUSE). The project began in the summer and the interview occurred in the following Spring. Six participants interviewed a student of their choice, and four attended a follow-up debrief meeting. Results showed that participants gained novel insights into their students’ lives. The focal case, Zaynah shows that the interview can also change an instructor’s deficit story about a student and their mathematics into an anti-deficit story. Zaynah’s post-interview description of her student, Maria, went from someone who had “weak algebra skills” and was “just kind ofthere,” to a student who had a well-researched and articulated academic and life goals, and a “passion” that Zaynah “knew nothing about.” Zaynah accepted that math “wasn’t [Maria’s] thing,” and that “she can and will do the math” to achieve those goals. The anti-deficit framework and the socio-ecological perspective rejected a simple narrative of a deficit-oriented instructor who changed after the interview experience. Zaynah is not a deficit-oriented instructor. Her description of her other students in the workshop—all women of color— were positive, with no mention of deficits. Instead, it is a more complex story of the interplay of narratives about mathematics and students of color, and the impact of the interview with a student and the role of the community in shifting deficit stories. It is showing promise of applying FoK project’s core principles in undergraduate mathematics beyond curriculum design. 

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3. Constructing Instructors’ Classroom Practices from Students’ Survey Responses

   Adiredja, A P; Kale; B; Jarnutowski, B (August 2025, Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education, SIGMAA on RUME.)

   Cook, S; Katz, B P; Melhuish, K (Ed.)

   This preliminary report shares an outcome from a summer professional development (PD) activity with university instructors. Instructors participated in four PD meetings, then immediately taught a five-day summer workshop using inquiry, working primarily with first-generation minoritized students. While instructor participants’ exit interviews of the project identified their experience in the summer PD as pivotal to their development, we know little of how students experienced the instructors’ teaching during the workshop. Our analysis focuses on two items from student post-workshop survey wherein students shared their feedback of their instructor and their experiences more broadly. This analysis allowed us to get a good sense of the instructors’ individual practices and revealed convergence in their practices. Pedagogically, instructors utilized group work and deemphasized direct instructions, while prioritizing students’ engagement in discussions and struggling through conceptual ideas. Relationally, instructors were responsive to students’ mathematical needs and created a respectful, safe, and welcoming classroom environment. 

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4. Instructional decision making in a gateway Quantitative Reasoning course

   https://doi.org/10.5038/1936-4660.17.1.1451  

   Budhathoki, Deependra; Foley, Gregory; Shadik, Stephen (January 2024, Numeracy)

   Grawe, Nathan D (Ed.)

   Many educators and professional organizations recommend Quantitative Reasoning as the best entry-level postsecondary mathematics course for non-STEM majors. However, novice and veteran instructors who have no prior experience in teaching a QR course often express their ignorance of the content to choose for this course, the instruction to offer students, and the assessments to measure student learning. We conducted a case study to investigate the initial implementation of an entry-level university quantitative reasoning course during fall semester, 2018. The participants were the course instructor and students. We examined the instructor’s motives and actions and the students’ responses to the course. The instructor had no prior experience teaching a QR course but did have 15 years of experience teaching student-centered mathematics. Data included course artifacts, class observations, an instructor interview, and students’ written reflections. Because this was a new course—and to adapt to student needs—the instructor employed his instructional autonomy and remained flexible in designing and enacting the course content, instruction, and assessment. His instructional decision making and flexible approach helped the instructor tailor the learning activities and teaching practices to the needs and interests of the students. The students generally appreciated and benefited from this approach, enjoyed the course, and provided positive remarks about the instructors’ practices. 

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5. Let’s discuss our COPUS together: Findings from data-informed faculty professional development programs across three campuses

   https://doi.org/10.3998/tia.6826  

   Ditta, Annie Stanfield; Signorini, Adriana; Williams, Mathew; Johns, Eric R; Aebersold, Andrea; Zimmerman, James; Eastman, Samantha; Sato, Brian; Kranzfelder, Petra (November 2025, To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development)

   Structured classroom observation protocols provide instructors with data about their teaching practices, but instructors may not meaningfully engage with those data without guidance. To facilitate instructor reflection, educational developers from the Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) and educational researchers from STEM departments across three campuses collaborated to design and implement a novel faculty professional development program that would promote reflection on teaching using instructors’ Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS; Smith et al., 2013) data—a program we call data-informed professional development (DIPD). The program involved faculty completion of/participation in a teaching reflection, structured classroom observations from two course sessions, at least one meeting with CTL staff, an exit interview, and an opportunity to update their original teaching reflection. Through qualitatively coding the post-DIPD exit interviews, we found that instructors primarily reflected on their COPUS data with a desire to increase student engagement. Instructors also described being more open to making small changes to their courses, feeling supported to make changes to their teaching, and feeling that there was an important element of community-building in the DIPD program. And finally, instructors described how the DIPD experience was beneficial for promoting reflection on teaching practices, but the meeting portion was critical–providing data from the structured observations alone was not sufficient for a variety of reasons. Our study can serve as a teaching professional development model for how educational developers and education researchers can collaborate to prompt instructors to critically reflect on their teaching practices using structured observation protocols.  

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