Framing 2020: Disaster Vulnerability In Our Math Community

By Melinda Lanius, Assistant Professor, Auburn University

The year 2020 was the year of being alone, together. We each experienced the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting emergency measures in our own way. The interruption impacted all facets of life: social, political, economic, and educational. Our spheres blurred together in ways they never had before, with work meetings conducted from home offices hastily built in a bedroom or even a closet. 

Emergency remote teaching and learning of mathematics was a disaster.

Now, I don’t mean that in the colloquial it-was-awful sense of the word. I mean our collective experience meets the academic definition of a disaster. In this blog post, I will provide an analytical framework that is helping me to contextualize my experience of the past year and to find a way to move forward from it. My hope is that you too may find this way of reflecting useful as we build a new normal for our campuses and broader mathematical communities.

Framing 2020: What happened? 

Is there anything to be learned from the collective remote teaching, learning, and researching experiment? What do we take with us to build the new normal?

Malinda Lanius

I will begin by unpacking the term disaster. Academic disaster theory began in 1920 with Samuel Henry Prince’s systematic study of the Halifax Explosion in Nova Scotia, Canada [5]. Originally, the term disaster was closely tied to the agent or hazard [6], which in this case was an explosion killing 2000 people and destroying everything within a half-mile radius. Most present-day definitions focus on community-disruption fallout rather than the hazards causing the interruption. A disaster is a form of collective stress with serious community-wide disruption of social, economic, and environmental conditions [8]. Accordingly, the massive disruption and change in our work and education systems in 2020 constitutes a disaster.

Why framing 2020 as a disaster is useful

This lens allows and appreciates negative experiences. For example, recognizing 2020 as a disaster allows a distinction between online education and emergency remote teaching. Online education was a pre-disaster product where students and teachers opted in with concrete planning and goals. Emergency remote teaching was a necessity that everyone was forced to undertake with little preparation. While certainly some folks thrived in this new environment—which is great—labeling the phenomenon a disaster allows guilt-free acknowledgement of struggle. You aren’t “weak” for not flourishing during work from home. It was a disaster and the goal was weathering novel operating norms in the short-term.  

However, there is much more value in this perspective than simply allowing us to publicly admit that times were tough. Disaster theory enables us to document the extent of disruptions and to understand vulnerabilities in our systems. Zakour and Gillespie detail this process in their book “Community Disaster Vulnerability” [8].  A system is vulnerable if it has a reduced capacity to adapt. They define a liability as a characteristic causing reduced capacity. A positive characteristic that allows adaptation is called a capability. A discussion of a disaster can include characteristics exhibited by individuals or small sub-communities all the way up to nation-wide policy variables. Once we’ve fully characterized our collective disaster experience, we can then foster community capabilities and build to a more inclusive and resilient normal. 

Important assumptions about disaster vulnerability theory

To illustrate these assumptions, I’ll analyze an example of a vulnerability. The term food desert refers to an urban area with limited access to affordable fresh food. Simply put, in a food desert there are no grocery stores or markets within a mile, despite there being a high density urban/suburban population. The vulnerability framework acknowledges that vulnerability is not evenly distributed among people or communities. In this example, a food desert will affect households differently. To a family that owns a car, driving further away to buy groceries is annoying, but doable. To a family who relies on public transportation, a grocery trip can take all day or become cost-prohibitive, leaving them to subsist on nearby processed, high-in-sugar, high-in-fat foods. 

Importantly, vulnerability theory clarifies that vulnerability is primarily caused by the system. Disaster vulnerability is not caused by “bad decisions” by an individual. Vulnerability is socially constructed: the system determines who is at risk. To illustrate with our food desert example, we don’t blame the residents of the neighborhood for living where they do and tell them to just move. If a household can’t afford a personal vehicle, affording housing in an alternative neighborhood and funding a move is unreasonable. Further, many urban areas are also facing housing shortages (Note this is yet another vulnerability! Vulnerabilities frequently intersect and compound, creating greater risk for certain members of society.) We also don’t blame one individual grocery store chain for not building in our neighborhood. Our economy is set up to celebrate entrepreneurial freedom and choice.

Our final assumption to clarify is that certain demographics may be associated with, but do not cause, disaster vulnerability. Those traditionally labeled “vulnerable” tend to also be marginalized by the system in some way. For example, food deserts are more abundant in minority neighborhoods. These folks aren’t vulnerable because of some innate characteristic. They’re vulnerable because historically they’ve been physically excluded from certain urban areas as well as being denied public resources. (I recommend reading about redlining policies in your community.)

In summary, structural factors create vulnerability, which allows hazards to trigger a disaster. The vulnerability existed before and may persist after the hazard. Food deserts are a very big problem, with no clear person or individual company to hold accountable - which is frustrating! My goal is to identify these sorts of gaps within mathematics, where some folks are resilient and others are left vulnerable by our systems, and to help close them moving forward.

Identifying Liabilities

A. Limited internet access

The first liability I observed is at the nation-wide level and concerns infrastructure. This summer the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released an interactive map that shows the areas of the United States where folks are not utilizing high-speed broadband internet [2]. In some instances, the service is not available at all in the area. In other cases, while the service is technically available on the market, it is cost-prohibitive. In the map below, red indicates an area where high-speed internet is not being utilized.

Screenshot: NTIA Indicators of Broadband Need map

As is the case with most liabilities, certain communities are more vulnerable. The NTIA map allows you to see how “high poverty” areas (where 20% of households in the community have income below the poverty level) or how tribal lands intersect the red areas. Below, I have shown a screenshot of tribal lands in the state of Arizona.  

Screenshot: NTIA Indicators of Broadband Need map, tribal land highlighted in black-hatching.

When triggered by the COVID-19 hazard, this infrastructure liability led to greater harm for certain students. In a survey of the undergraduate students who took a Spring 2020 math course at the University of Arizona, one student shared “I live on a Native American Reservation…. Where I live we have curfew from 8 PM to 5 AM and 57 hour lockdowns. Which GREATLY limited my access to my education” [1]. This student was not able to adapt in the same way as others in our university community, leaving them to suffer greater side effects during the disaster.   

B. Digital literacy gap

The second liability I observed concerns academia generally, not just mathematics departments. Prior to 2020, many professors and instructors only had very basic digital skills. These skills typically centered on a learning management system to post a syllabus and grades, as well as using email [3]. When education moved online, these folks were forced to learn many new systems all at once, rather than being able to focus on content—their area of expertise. And students noticed. One University of Arizona math student wrote about their math class: “Teachers learning how to use zoom was the hardest part.” Another shared, “My teacher knew barely anything about operating computers and did everything by hand over a cheap webcam” and yet another wrote, “our professor had little to no experience with Zoom and technology, so it was very difficult to learn…” Not only has this literacy gap impacted students, it has caused burnout in faculty. The Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed 1,122 faculty from 2- and 4-year colleges and universities across the United States in October 2020 [4]. Those reporting stress and fatigue doubled from 2019 to 2020 with over half of respondents saying they were seriously considering a career change or early retirement.

C. Incompatible Norms of Communication

The final liability I want to discuss concerns a breakdown of communication between math instructors and undergraduate students. Communication challenges existed prior to the pandemic: In 2020, Yee, Deshler, Rogers, Papalia, and Lamarche analyzed formal complaints about mathematics graduate student instructors at two large universities in the United States from years 2014 to 2019. They found that 69% of students' complaints concerning an out-of-class issue were centered around communication, particularly via email. Yee, et al. suggest that future professional development for graduate student instructors should address email communication and that this is critical for student success in the classroom. When education moved online in Spring 2020, we found that inadequate communication with an instructor was one of the greatest predictors for a substantial increase in math anxiety among University of Arizona math students [1].

Having identified liabilities in our systems, what now?

While we may not be able to change many of the larger root causes of disaster in society, we can make risk mitigation plans that better serve our students and support their learning. This post is not to indict any department’s or individual’s response to the pandemic. Although the word ‘novel’ is overly-worn, it is indeed fitting here. This was a novel disaster, with no established disaster response model. I recognize and applaud the thought and effort that went into making ground-breaking decisions, both at a departmental and individual-instructor level. I believe this extraordinary effort should not be forgotten. I want to document what worked, what didn’t, and help shape a better new normal. Please consider this an open invitation to start the conversation. I’ve merely given a handful of vulnerabilities that I’ve noticed. Let’s work on constructing a complete list and begin brainstorming solutions. By closing the vulnerabilities gap, we can build back with a more equitable new normal for all students and colleagues in our mathematics community.

References:

[1] Lanius, M., Farrell, A., Jones , T., Kao, S., Lazarus, T. (2021). Unmotivated, Depressed, Anxious: Impact of the COVID-19 Emergency Transition to Remote Learning on Undergraduates’ Math Anxiety. preprint, 10 pages.

[2] McGill, M. H. Exclusive: White House debuts new maps showing broadband vacuum (2021). Axios. https://www.axios.com/broadband-maps-infrastructure-66a91da4-c0f4-415c-8e84-1f58b829b323.html. 

[3] Morrison, D. Higher Ed's Digital Skills Gap: Faculty & Students. Online Learning Insights. (2016). https://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2016/11/19/higher-eds-digital-skills-gap-faculty-students/. 

[4] Nietzel, M. T. Pandemic Toll: More Than Half Of College Faculty Have Considered A Career Change Or Early Retirement. (2021). Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/02/26/pandemic-toll-more-than-half-of-college-faculty-have-considered-a-career-change-or-early-retirement/?sh=1edee40b12da. 

[5] Perry, Ronald W. (2018). Defining disaster: An evolving concept. In: Rodríguez, H., Donner, W., Trainor, J., eds.  Handbook of disaster research. Springer, Cham, 2018. pp. 3-22.

[6] Prince, Samuel Henry. (1920). Catastrophe and social change. PhD dissertation. Faculty of Political Science Columbia University, New York, USA. 

[7] Yee, S.P., Deshler, J., Rogers, K.C., Papalia, N., & Lamarche, A. (2020). Interpreting undergraduate student complaints about graduate student instructors through the lens of the instructional practices guide. Proceedings from 23rd Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education. pp. 673-681.

[8] Zakour, Michael J., and David F. Gillespie. (2013). Community disaster vulnerability. Theory, Research, and Practice.

Melinda Lanius is an assistant professor of math discipline based education research at Auburn University. In her spare time, she enjoys outdoor adventures with her dog Johnny, long distance running, jigsaw puzzles, and podcasts.