It’s unusual to see yourself represented in a math problem. It’s even more unusual if you’re a Native student in one of the more than 500 tribes dotted across the United States. That’s why Jennifer Morris likes to teach Quantway, which contains new lessons adapted to Native community contexts.

“Students know that they’re not represented in the textbooks, and they’ve known it all along,” Morris said, “but until they see themselves represented, they don’t realize what an impact that has.”

Morris has taught Quantway at the College of Menominee Nation in Wisconsin since 2017. In any given semester, 12 to 16 tribes are represented among the school’s approximately 250 students.

She said it’s a big step forward for her students to see culturally relevant situations in the math, even if it’s not specific to the tribe with which they identify.

“It’s kind of like if you live in a city, you would appreciate word problems about an urban area, whether it’s about your specific city or not,” she said.

One example of how students connect to Quantway instruction is with the student contract, required of every student at the beginning of the course to commit to giving their best efforts to the class and to each other.

“Rather than going with the standard normal looking contract, we use the Grandfather Teachings, which is Pan-Indian (not specific to a particular tribe),” she said.

The Grandfather Teachings, according to Morris, are a set of values, such as humility and bravery, common among many tribes. These values are incorporated in the student contract.

“Students will say, we need to be humble enough to give help to other students when they need it,’” she said. “But then more difficult is being humble enough to ask for help when we need it.”

She said it’s because of Carnegie Math Pathways that she’s been able to connect with other tribal colleges and universities to adapt math lessons specifically for their students.

Morris participates in the Pathways Curriculum Committee, working with other TCU faculty to create culturally relevant lessons adapted to Native community contexts. This group has so far developed 12 lessons which will be available for use this fall to the entire NIC.

Morris has been at the College of Menominee Nation since 2010 and is currently the Dean of Retention as well as an adjunct faculty member. She looks forward to the school year ahead as her campus will also begin teaching Statway.

I have always been decent at math. Not phenomenal. But I know that 2+2 will always equal 4. So maybe average is a better word to describe my math abilities. But before last semester, I hadn’t taken a math class in, oh, the better of fifteen years. So, when my college advisor advised me to take this new math class offered through Carnegie, mentioning it was fast-paced and stuffed full of things I had surely forgotten how to do, I tried to talk her out of letting me join. I failed.

And let me tell you, she wasn’t wrong about the amount of work. There’s homework every, single day. Sometimes two to three hours’ worth. And you attend class four days a week. Every day is a new lesson, and if you miss a day, it can be difficult to get caught back up. You will get frustrated. You will want to throw your book AND break your pencil. (Heaven knows I did!)

I attended math tutoring almost every day. You will also be forced to work in groups, which I absolutely hated for about the first two weeks of class. But now that class is over, I am sad I won’t get to spend as much time with my classmates, who are now my friends.

I have always been the type of person who hates being wrong and I definitely hated struggling to figure something out. But the way this course is set up and laid out, I’ve learned it’s okay to not know what’s going on or not know how to solve a problem. It’s totally okay to struggle and it’s totally okay to get the answer wrong.

In order to succeed, you must be willing to fail. It will build character. Don’t give up and keep pushing yourself. Ask questions, and if you’re lucky enough to have an amazing math Professor like I did, (SHOUT OUT to Jan Miller at Bay Mills Community College ), there will never be a silly or wrong question to ask. Plus, it will force you to take a different approach to a problem, to think outside of the box.

This class has taught me a lot, and not just about math. I know it sounds cliché, but this class changed my life. And after finding new ways to grow my brain and access problems with a new set of skills, I feel my next math courses will be, if just a tiny bit, easier to manage.

You don’t have to be a math person to figure out how to do math, you just need to keep an open mind. Remember, it’s okay to struggle. I just hope you can find it within yourself to stick with it. Take the leap and have faith. I’m glad I did.

Stephanne Johnson took Quantway this past spring at Bay Mills Community College in Michigan. She identifies with the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Her instructor was Jan Miller.

Meet this month’s featured NIC member, Greg Koscik, nominated by his Faculty Mentor for his exceptional commitment to improving Quantway curriculum and pedagogy.

A Quantway instructor of two years at Nicolet Area Technical College in Wisconsin, Koscik, is playing an important role in one of the Pathways network’s biggest milestones: the development of new, fully-online courses.

With the Pathways online design team, Koscik is helping develop an online Quantway Core course scheduled to roll out in the spring of 2020. He has been heavily involved in the content transformation process, testing, and design of the new virtual course.

As part of the Pathwyas Curriculum Committee, Koscik also reviews assessment items and works on Item Bank improvement. Over the past year, he has systematically organized all items in the Quantway College Item Bank and ensured that all lessons had a sufficient number of items. This revamped Item Bank will be released for use in the fall. He regularly teaches Quantway Core and College both in-person and online.

He said one big draw to teaching and developing Quantway courses is that the curriculum places math in meaningful context for students, which leads to higher retention and success rates.

“The way it is now in most one-size-fits-all (algebra) classes, there’s little to no authentic context. In most traditional classes there’s only solving for X for the sake of solving for X,” Koscik said, adding that Quantway content is something that students genuinely want to learn.

His Faculty Mentor, Aaron Altose of Cuyahoga Community College in Ohio, reaffirmed Koscik’s commitment to creating engaging contextualized lessons.

“Greg is a frequent contributor to the Pathways network, sharing ideas for new Quantitative Reasoning contexts and ways to strengthen the pedagogy and assessments of Quantway College,” Altose said.

“He truly aspires for Quantway College to be the best possible course for his students and also for the health and growth of the Carnegie Math Pathways as a whole.”

Altose added that Koscik continuously seeks ways to both improve the course and increase its rigor.

Koscik also plays a central role in training newly hired adjuncts to teach Quantway at Nicolet as a Faculty Facilitator on his campus.

Beyond his involvement with Carnegie Math Pathways, Koscik is an active member of WisMATYC–the Wisconsin Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges.

Koscik graduated from Oakland University in Michigan with a master’s degree in Mathematics in 2010. He began teaching at Nicolet in 2013 after teaching at College of the Albemarle in North Carolina from 2010 to 2013.

A newly released WestEd study examines the challenges and successes of the Pathways’ corequisite implementation at six institutions in six different states. Across these institutions, 65% of students—students who would have otherwise been placed into traditional developmental courses—earned college math credit in a single semester. That’s more than three times the success rate of the traditional remedial approach, saving students time and money on their path to a degree.

On March 13th, we hosted a webinar to share these promising findings alongside the Pathways faculty who piloted the corequisite offerings:

• • Ellen Mulqueeny, Math Faculty, Kent State University
  • Yolanda Manzano, Math Faculty, Richland College
  • Thales Georgiou, Instructional Dean, Richland College
  • Kelly Kohlmetz, Math Faculty, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

You can view answers here to questions posed during the webinar that our panelists could not answer in the allotted time.

When Brenda Oursler White first started college, she wanted to be an art teacher. Although she had a passion for art at the begnning of her academic career, she missed math and ultimately earned an associate’s degree in liberal arts, mathematics at SUNY Morrisville.

After transferring to Syracuse University, she worked as a student employee in the Learning Center and Office of Disability Services, where she saw first-hand just how prevalent math anxiety was on her campus.

“That is when I decided to not just become a math teacher but to stay in the arena of higher education,” she said.

At Syracuse, she went on to earn her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in math education, as well as a master’s in higher education student affairs. In 2000, she returned to her alma mater, SUNY Morrisville, where she is now an associate professor in the department of mathematical sciences.

In 2015 White set out to learn more about Quantway and Statway at the request of Morrisville president, Dave Rodgers, who had heard about these programs from the SUNY system’s then-chancellor, Nancy Zimpher.

“So many students start at the remedial (or) developmental level and are taking basic arithmetic—elementary algebra—two, three, four, five times without success and then often leave,” White said.

“(We were) really trying to create an alternative Pathway to help students be more successful so we brought this to our campus very slowly.”

By the fall of 2016, White was team-teaching Quantway at her campus. The team-teaching model, she said, allowed her and her colleagues to learn from each other and to continue the process of training other colleagues on how to teach Quantway.

Since 2016, White has also become increasingly involved with Carnegie Math Pathways behind the scenes, most recently as our newest Faculty Mentor, a role in which she helps faculty teaching the Pathways for the first time. She is also a lead writer for Quantway Fundamentals lessons and writes and reviews lessons as part of the CMP Curriculum Committee. She serves as a SUNY Pathways Faculty Liaison, where she works with other SUNY faculty to ensure their professional needs are met. And, she has participated in the Mindset Scholars Network, where she provided and gained meaningful feedback on her Quantway instruction.

While she has found her involvement with the Pathways professional learning teams rewarding, she most cherishes the changes she sees in her students when they experience the Quantway course. White reflected on a student who was intensely math-phobic, but who quickly embraced the group learning dynamics of Quantway.

“I don’t know if she would still be here, honestly, if it wasn’t for Quantway…It’s changed her life,” she said, noting that the student most recently expressed this in a letter to White, along with gratitude for her instruction and for Quantway.

White looks forward to continuing her Pathways work in the New Year, and to helping other educators in the network improve their practice.