Being Human in Mathematics and Statistics

By Sarah L. Bunnell, Shu-Min Liao, Megan Lyster, and Sheila Jaswal

The Being Human in STEM (HSTEM) Initiative arose out of a time of conflict at Amherst College. Students occupied the College library for four days, giving voice to their experiences of marginalization and exclusion on campus. Over the preceding 5 years, Amherst had dramatically expanded the diversity of its student body; in this moment, students were sharing that while the College had diversified, it still had a long way to go toward inclusion and equity.

Many students at the protest shared exclusionary experiences that happened in STEM at Amherst. In response, Sheila Jaswal joined 9 students in co-designing a special topics course that had four overarching goals:

Create a meaningful sense of community and belonging among members of the class, such that individuals could be curious and vulnerable with each other as co-learners;
Create avenues for all participants to reflect on their own lived experiences in STEM and to learn about the experiences about others in the class;
Develop an expansive understanding of the literature on inclusion and inequities in STEM, and leverage this knowledge to construct a deeper understanding of one’s own experiences and positionalities in STEM; and
Make a meaningful difference in the community, by developing equity-minded action projects.

These goals, which emerged organically in the initial special topics seminar, remain the overarching structure for the Being Human in STEM course, which just finished its 11th iteration at Amherst College and is now being taught across colleges and universities across the United States. The Being Human in STEM book, published this Spring by Stylus Publishing, describes the origin of the course, provides guides for creating an HSTEM course at your own institution, describes inclusive practices that our students have identified as creating more inclusive communities in any course, and provides a framework for assessing institutional change and impact. The voices of student and faculty participants in the Amherst College HSTEM course are woven throughout the book, sharing their perspective on the ways in which their involvement with HSTEM has impacted their experience as a learner and/or as a teacher. The last chapter of the book also presents the voices of scholars from the first 9 institutions to bring this course to their own campus; they share how they have modified the course to align it with their institutional structures and student body, as well as the lessons they gained, about their students, about their discipline, and about their roles as educations, through teaching an HSTEM course.

At Amherst, the last two offerings of HSTEM have been co-taught by Shu-Min Liao, Assistant Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Amherst College. Here are some of her reflections about this experience:

My name is Shu-Min Liao, and I began teaching at Amherst College in 2009. I’m currently finishing co-teaching HSTEM for the second time. I feel that it is very important for students in Math or Stats, or any other quantitative discipline, to take a course like HSTEM. We deal with data on a daily basis, and yet our courses often have a minimal focus on data ethics and the subjectivity of the decisions that are made throughout the data collection and analysis cycle. We should be providing students with time to reflect on these issues, to help them be aware of their implicit biases and how their own identities and positionalities may contribute to their processes.

Additionally, there is a lot of work that we do in HSTEM to help students learn how to learn from each other, and to activate their empathy for each other. As mathematicians and statisticians, our graduates will need to be able to work with diverse others and truly listen to and learn from each other. It’s a beautiful thing for students to understand that in fact, their peers have different strengths than them. When they take this course, they learn how to learn from their peers, and I learn more about them as well. Teaching this course has allowed me to reach a larger student population, which in turn has helped me understand the different needs that students have in my courses.

Many of the activities that we use in HSTEM can be embedded into courses across the curriculum, and teaching HSTEM has given me lots of inspiration for activities in my other classes, such as adding particular modules on ethics or ways of knowing, community building activities, or additional reflection opportunities. I’ve also learned how to model co-learning with my students, and I am co-creating aspects of my other courses with students now more intentionally.

Because the HSTEM course is co-taught at Amherst, I have been able to learn from and be inspired by my colleagues across disciplines. This experience has helped me remain curious about what I’m doing as a teacher in the classroom, as well as opening my eyes to different possibilities as an educator. I get to be a learner again! This experience has also helped me to understand my own lived experiences in a different way. I grew up in Taiwan, and there was a lot of discrimination. I was told that I was not a “typical Taiwanese girl” because I was good at math. When I came to the United States, I experienced culture shock and the challenge of English not being my mother language, as well as additional experiences of discrimination. Usually, I would try to ignore it, swallow it, and try not to think about it, but those things have accumulated inside of me. Teaching HSTEM has given me some space and time to reflect on those experiences. It’s been a self-healing process because now I understand that this is a systemic problem, not a problem with me. And in talking with my students and colleagues, I have started to realize that there are a lot of things that we should work together to change. I see the hope, and I am more energized in the classroom as a result.

Interested in learning more about Being Human in STEM? We’d love to hear from you!

Sarah, Sheila, Shu-Min, Megan, and the rest of the HSTEM Network

For questions or connections, you can contact: Sarah Bunnell; sbunnell@amherst.edu. We’ll get you connected with the rest of the HSTEM team!

You can also find us on Twitter: Sarah @slbunnell; Sheila @DrJ_HumanInStem

Author Biographies:

Sarah Bunnell is the Associate Director and STEM Specialist for the Amherst College Center for Teaching and Learning and the Past-President of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Shu-Min Liao is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Amherst College.

Megan Lyster is the Assistant Director of the Wurtele Center at Smith College. She previously was the Instructional Designer for Experiential Learning in the Center for Community Engagement at Amherst College.

Sheila Jaswal is a Professor of Chemistry and Interim Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer at Amherst College.