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You Don’t Want to Come Into a Broken System: Perspectives for Increasing Diversity in STEM Among Undergraduate Calculus Program Stakeholders

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Abstract

As attention grows towards the disparities and underrepresentation of minoritized groups within undergraduate STEM education, there is a need for understanding how university calculus program stakeholders perceive the issue of increasing diversity. Calculus is a subject crucial to many STEM disciplines, and thus can play an outsized role in facilitating necessary change across STEM fields. We present a research-driven framework from a thematic analysis of interviews and focus groups with calculus program stakeholders (students, faculty, staff, and administrators) at two universities in the United States. The framework juxtaposes various stakeholders’ motivations for diversifying STEM fields along critical and dominant axes with four primary recipients that benefit from diversifying STEM. This framework prompts critical analysis of increasing access and achievement within the current system while also attending to the need to fundamentally change mathematical structures to bolster individual identities and increase the power of marginalized individuals in STEM disciplines.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (DUE I-USE #1430540) and run under the auspices of the Mathematical Association of America.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Rachel Tremaine & Jessica Ellis Hagman

  2. Department of Engineering and Science Education, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

    Matthew Voigt & Stephanie Damas

  3. Department of Mathematics, University of Texas, San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Jessica Gehrtz

Authors
  1. Rachel Tremaine
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  2. Jessica Ellis Hagman
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  3. Matthew Voigt
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  4. Stephanie Damas
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  5. Jessica Gehrtz
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Contributions

All authors contributed to analysis and writing; Hagman, Voigt, and Gehrtz participated in the data collection.

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Correspondence to Jessica Ellis Hagman.

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Tremaine, R., Hagman, J.E., Voigt, M. et al. You Don’t Want to Come Into a Broken System: Perspectives for Increasing Diversity in STEM Among Undergraduate Calculus Program Stakeholders. Int. J. Res. Undergrad. Math. Ed. 8, 365–388 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40753-022-00184-x

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