Lecturer in Mathematics and Engineering Education, School Lead for Inclusive Scholarship for the Centre for Academic Inclusion in S&E
This project aims to co-design teaching toolkit materials featuring short biographies of past and present mathematicians, scientists and engineers from under-represented minority groups to embed within undergraduate STEM courses.
STEM disciplines have traditionally been taught as an exercise in memorisation and repetitive application of formulae, with limited historical aspects often confined to the contributions made by white, male, European mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. As a result of this, very few students can relate to these mathematical figures, which consequently contributes to the stigma that studying STEM subjects is esoteric, inaccessible, and extremely difficult for them.
To rectify this, we led an educational initiative to increase students’ awareness of diverse representation within STEM disciplines; not just through exposure to mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from diverse and under-represented backgrounds (e.g. African, Islamic, Asian, female, disabled, and LGBTQ), but also those applying their skills within academia and industry through non-traditional pathways. This would present students with inspiring examples of both historic and current STEM professionals to serve as positive role models.
“Before reading these articles, I was not aware of any diverse individuals within the STEM sector. The large majority of mathematicians, scientists, engineers that I knew where of white-European origin.”
As part of an earlier EDI initiative within the School of Mathematical Sciences (SMS) in July 2022, Prof. Claudia Garetto and a small group of PhD students had developed a teaching toolkit resource featuring biographies of prominent mathematicians, both past and present, from a range of minority groups. Inspired by this, Dr. Shah led an education scholarship project aimed at diversifying STEM curricula within core undergraduate mathematics-based modules in SEMS and across QMUL, which had not been done before.
To expand the resources to SEMS, Dr. Shah recognised the need to include additional meaningful biographies (of applied mathematicians, scientists and engineers) and introducing additional subcategories (e.g. Caribbean, South Asian). He also decided to adopt a co-creation ‘students-as-partners' approach to directly involve undergraduate students (by recruiting second-year SEMS undergraduate Ms. Ava Dahlia Belafonte) in designing these teaching materials featuring biographies and multimedia resources such as article links and interview videos to highlight the contributions of historic and current ‘STEM champions’ from under-represented minority groups.
Following the development of the resources throughout Semester A, they were subsequently embedded within two core undergraduate mathematics and mechanics Semester B modules, both led by Dr. Shah within SEMS: a first-year module Computational and Mathematical Modelling 2 and a second-year module Numerical Methods and Data Science, each comprising 300 students. As part of the preliminary implementation phase, it was decided to choose large, introductory modules to allow for maximal impact in terms of student numbers. This could then be extended to third-year modules as well to help influence and improve the NSS student satisfaction survey results across the School.
Dr. Shah also coordinated this initiative at Faculty level by promoting collaborative work between his undergraduate student and a teaching fellow colleague from SEMS with Prof. Garetto’s team in the School of Mathematical Sciences comprising a postdoctoral researcher, a teaching fellow and a PhD student for co-development of the resources.
“I did not know about how diverse STEM was before. The teaching materials encourage young minds from diverse backgrounds to pursue careers in STEM, creating a positive cycle of inclusion. By embracing the talents and perspectives of minorities in STEM, we can build a more equitable and dynamic scientific community.”
Following the embedding of these resources within both his modules, Dr. Shah devised and administered two sets of dedicated feedback surveys through QMPlus to evaluate, obtain and inspect feedback from his students on the inclusion of these resources within the curricula.
The completed evaluation resulted in extremely positive student feedback (see comments below) and helped increase the student satisfaction results to 82% from 67%.
The additional impact of these resources also included:
“I was surprised that I never heard about Gladys West (African American mathematician) or the six ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) women programmers”.
We hope that developed the resources and inclusive curricula STEM toolkit created available on the SEMS EDI webpage and SEMS EDI QMPlus course page can be widely used by academics and educators across other faculties and schools at QMUL and beyond.
Dr. Shah has also been successful in securing funding from the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) to expand the initiative even further by liaising with a colleague at the Open University to run combined cross-institutional student focus groups to evaluate the resources and obtain additional feedback to develop and refine the toolkit further.
“I found it interesting to learn about the challenges women faced in the academic world and how much harder they had to work than their male counterparts in order to be recognised for their achievements. It also gave me some insight into how much society has progressed.”
Lecturer in Mathematics and Engineering Education