June 5 2026 – Experience sharing with David Pritchard
Title: Mathematics in Society: two years of teaching it (mostly) wrong?
A recent review of our first-year curriculum at the University of Strathclyde gave us the opportunity to introduce a new module, Mathematics in Society. This is a core module for students on single-honours mathematics and statistics degrees, which aims to address a perceived lack of “soft” skills; at the same time, it aims to broaden students’ understanding of mathematics, drawing on resources from the history of mathematics.
Content and approach
The starting point for students is the question “What is mathematics, anyway?” (We warn them that we will not answer this!) Specifically, we pose questions such as “where do mathematical ideas come from?”, “who gets to spend their time doing mathematics?” and “where do people think mathematically?” Successive blocks look at mathematics and games, mathematics and government, mathematics and art, and mathematical modelling. Throughout we interpret “mathematics” as widely as possible, stressing the porous boundary between academic and non-academic mathematical activities.
The spirit of the module is closest to that of Jacqueline Stedall’s The History of Mathematics: a Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012), with some influence from Francis Su’s Mathematics for Human Flourishing (Yale, 2020). We don’t attempt to give an overall historical picture; we don’t focus on the names and stories behind the mathematics that students already know; and we don’t try to train students as historians. (It is a full-time job to steer students through the school/university transition and train them as mathematicians.) We do try to give students a historically informed sense of mathematics as a human activity, which is situated in specific contexts and cross-fertilises with other activities, and to encourage them to think carefully about sources and evidence.
For example, in the “mathematics and art” block, we touch on topics such as weaving (as an art form and a technology, with discussion of patterns and algorithms), mathematics as a status indicator in art (with reference to the recently reinterpreted portrait of the Jamaican landowner Francis Williams), and the mathematical construction of average or “ideal” human beings (from da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to eugenics). In a seminar, we compare the work of Marjorie Rice and Roger Penrose on tilings, using the area of recreational mathematics to discuss who counts as a mathematician and why.
Reflections
- When we broadened the definition of mathematics, more diverse examples (at least along the axes of gender and of culture/nationality) followed naturally. We didn’t feel we were struggling to include “token” diversity.
- Students’ baseline knowledge was lower than we had anticipated. They generally found the history of mathematics interesting, but had little prior sense of who did what when. This suggests that the challenge isn’t to directly confront perceptions of mathematics as a white/Western/male monopoly, but to give students a framework for thinking about mathematics in which those perceptions don’t thrive.
- Students’ initial writing skills were often poor, they struggled to read texts of more than a few hundred words, and we had to start from scratch when it came to using and citing sources. However, students often responded thoughtfully in group discussions.
- Topics involving “fairness” and identity were often engaging – among the best work we’ve seen so far was a group essay on mathematics and ethics. However, the language of “politics” turned many students off immediately. I suspect that terminology needs to be very carefully chosen: to frame our goals as, for example, “decolonising the curriculum” easily alienates students who are sympathetic to the ideas but not the jargon.
- We had the luxury of being able to design low-stakes assessments, including individual and group writing and discussion sessions, which give students multiple routes to pass the module. Partly because of this and partly because we include peer review for all written work, we have so far seen very little sign of LLM-assisted dishonesty.
- However, breaching the familiar assessment “contract” based on worked examples caused anxiety. When students didn’t see an immediate connection between the content of lectures and the tasks set in assignments, some of them panicked and a few disengaged. This showed up strongly in the student feedback.
I don’t think we’ve yet got this module right, and we’ll continue to experiment with topics and presentation. One major regret is that the themes in this module aren’t picked up directly in subsequent years – which is inevitable given the pressures on the curriculum. However, if we have succeeded then our students have at least glimpsed a larger and more inclusive mathematical world.