Dr. Jess Ellis Hagman, CSU - Title: Centering students' identities to create critical transformations

Abstract: One way to critically transform undergraduate mathematics is to center aspects of students' identities to inform the structure of the mathematical spaces and systems that they are in. In this talk, I first draw on multiple large scale NSF projects seeking to improve introductory college math programs to propose a process for achieving critical transformations. I then use recent efforts at CSU to improve instruction for multilingual students as an example of this process, sharing how we used research on multilingual students' experiences to inform the instructional practices I used to teach a large (n=80), College Algebra class with a subsection restricted for multilingual students (n=14). I end by drawing on surveys and interviews from a subset of students in this class to discuss what did and did not land for students in this class. I hope this presentation can serve to (1) share practices that can support multilingual students and also many other students, and (2) exemplify how centering students' social identities can be used to design mathematics spaces to support more students to feel good mathematically.