Abstract Information: Many educational interventions and their evaluations work within the established educational system; few challenge that system. Interventions that work within the system seek improve safe aspects of the educational infrastructure: professional learning, new/modified curricula, and resources like new technology and materials. The Accessible Calculus Project, funded under the National Science Foundation’s “Racial Equity in STEM Education” program, offers a set of interventions designed to both fit within existing structures and also to disrupt those structures. The project fits within existing structures by involving near-peer College Math Literacy Workers (CMLWs) in the instruction of calculus within and outside of high school math classes. The project challenges existing structures by treating awareness of, access to, and agency within mathematics instruction as a civil right akin to voting rights and that American education perpetuates historic inequalities by providing Black and Hispanic students disproportionate access to math education. Moses and Cobb (2001) claim that these inequities make Black students “the designated serfs of the information age just as the people that we worked with in the 1960s on the plantations were Mississippi’s serfs then. There is an urgency to this” (p.11).
The project acknowledges that three conditions must work in tandem. First, CMLWs must know calculus and be able to share what they know with middle and high school students. American public education provides disproportionate access to calculus: wealthier students are more likely to have access to calculus and the higher educational opportunities such knowledge affords. This project disrupts stratification by not only providing calculus access but by presenting it as a right and supports students in their refusal to defer to an educational system that limits their access to valuable knowledge.
Second, the project hopes to grow CMLWs’ perceptions of the value of their knowledge. The project encourages CMLWs to see themselves as knowledge workers worthy of suitable compensation for sharing their knowledge, disrupting the assumption that credentialed teachers are the only or best ones to perform these tasks. This goes beyond simply asking the CMLWs to request compensation for instructing students but provides the space for them to negotiate their place as knowledge workers, suitable compensation, and who should pay for it.
Third, the project asks students to organize and consider their role in influencing educational policy. The project relies on CMLWs who are already organized through campus chapters of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). The project expects to expand the existing NSBE chapter structure by adding new organizational tasks: to hold each other accountable for what is acceptable calculus knowledge and pedagogical practice, to organize and foster in- and out-of-school learning activities, to determine what is acceptable compensation for their efforts knowing that different members may play different roles (instructors, trainers for instructors, leaders, etc). Importantly, project leadership provides encouragement, resources, and support for this work, but we do not know how students will respond nor what actions they will or will not take.
