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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. 

We discuss a professional development activity that engaged university mathematics instructors with anti-deficit teaching with minoritized students in the US. Our year-long program focuses on anti-deficit teaching and inquiry-based learning in mathematics at the university level. One important component of the program is an instructor-led interview with one of the instructor’s students. This activity is inspired by Funds of Knowledge work wherein primary and secondary mathematics teachers conduct home visits to learn about resources from the students’ lives and their families. Using data from two cohorts of participants we argue that the instructor-led interview within our project similarly humanized students, challenged deficit narratives about them, while also revealing their personal and community resources. Instructors learned about minoritized students’ experiences in higher education in the US. These individual stories also become great fodder for instructors’ group discussions and reflections about inequities and nuances in the experiences of minoritized students. We conclude with a methodological discussion about the interview as a professional development activity. 

We share our theorizing about a common statement regarding a math person that is often perceived as innocuous in society. More specifically, we are referring to people’s responses when an individual shares that they are studying mathematics, such as “I have always hated math” and “Oh, you must be so smart.” We draw on the notions of marked category, narratives, dehumanization, and microaggression. We use these theoretical constructs to argue that people’s responses are an instantiation of mathematics as a marked category and that they function as microaggressions, especially for minoritized students who are multiply marked. Moreover, due to their prevalence, they can contribute to students’ active choice of not doing mathematics in order to prioritize their humanity. Our report further highlights the importance of mathematical microaffirmations and the development of sub-communities within mathematics. 

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.