Episode 4 Jeffrey Jones

Jeffrey Jones, a math educator from Red Lake Community College, discusses his journey to becoming a math teacher and how his experiences influenced his identity as an educator. He emphasizes the importance of centering culture in education, particularly in tribal colleges. Jones talks about his efforts to incorporate non-Western ways of thinking into his teaching, such as using math history to highlight diverse perspectives. He also shares his experience with the Pathways Network, a professional development program that helped him integrate different ways of knowing and learning into his teaching. The program provided a platform for tribal college math instructors to network and share best practices. Jones mentions the challenge of assessing and grading differently, such as using standards-based grading to focus on mastery of learning goals. As the little crow flies, straight talk from indigenous communities. Today's discussion will be with Jeffrey Jones from the Red Lake Community College in northern Minnesota. Welcome, Jeffrey, to this podcast. First question I would like you to share with the folks is your overview about your journey to become a math educator and how your experiences both inside and outside of the context of academia have influenced your identity as a math educator. I actually came to teaching as a mid-career change. I had a number of different jobs for about 20 years in different industry settings until about 20 years ago, decided to go back and pick up some more education and in the process decided to actually get a teaching degree and a license to teach high school mathematics. So I came into teaching math from having had another set of experiences that I hoped would help me relating to students, relating to the material, having a different outlook on things than from just having gone straight into teaching. So I did that and then after a while of teaching high school mathematics and adding on to my education some more, I was able to start teaching at the junior college level and then I got hired as a math instructor at Red Lake Nation College, which really changed my whole trajectory again because while I had been teaching a lot of Native American students because I'd been teaching in northern Minnesota mostly and a high percentage of my students were always Native American, none of the institutions I taught at really embraced the idea of centering culture in the mission of delivering education. Tribal colleges have that as the center of their mission. Most tribal colleges have a mission statement, something like our mission statement at Red Lake Nation, which is to deliver excellent higher education grounded in the language and culture of the Red Lake Nation. And I taught places where I would have nearly 80, 90 percent of my students be Native American, but nobody ever thought, well, that's important for us to relate our teaching to the language and culture of our students. It was just thought, well, math is math and you just teach more or less the same as you kind of ignore who you're teaching to. Then that really changed and since I've been at this tribal college and since I've been able to expand my professional development, particularly through the Pathways Network, it's really changed how I teach and given me a whole new way of thinking about what it means to teach math to people. Very interesting. With each of these interviews, I find a connection. Your path is similar to mine. I was in financial services for about 20 years and came late to the game into education. But unlike you, I have never experienced that importance of that mission statement because I have not taught at a tribal college yet. That's an interesting point and it's a very important point of institutional support for culture within the education. But you've had these two experiences, one where that wasn't the explicit mission and one where it was definitely the explicit mission. How in your experience in maybe comparing those two situations, did you find the role of non-Western ways of thinking, of doing things that maybe you probably experienced in your teacher training programs? How was it different to try to apply non-Western ways of thinking at the tribal college? Maybe 20 years ago, I read for the first time a book, it's called The Crest of the Peacock by George Joseph, The Non-European Roots of Mathematics. And that just had such an enormous impact on me because I had read math history books before and I knew about the development of math historically, but it had always been sort of, well, it started with, it really started with the Greeks and then it went through the dark ages and then the Renaissance rediscovered that and some other people did some things, but then it goes into the Renaissance, it goes into the scientific revolution and everything. It just totally distorts how math has really developed. And that had a big impact on my thinking and so I made a point of trying to share those math history lessons with students, use math history elements and point out where historians were women or where they were non-Europeans and try to draw my students into the learning that way. So I kind of had that going into teaching at the tribal college. I was already sort of primed, so to speak, to talk about that, to learn about that, you know. But then I even was able to deepen my learning a whole lot by reading the Australian educators, Alan Bishop, his work on how mathematics is a universal cultural activity and you can look for every culture has math and he like laid out six different modes of math and all the different activities that they don't always look like Western classroom math. When somebody is using the stars to navigate or when they're keeping track of the seasons or when they're making complex geometric designs and they're weaving, it's not a classroom looking math. They're not doing things maybe like we would do in our classrooms, but it is math. So having those academic supports has been really important because when you're teaching, especially at a small institution, you kind of have to feel like if you teach a college algebra class or really anything, a biology class, a calculus class, whatever it is, and you want this other institution that's much bigger, a state institution like Arizona State, to accept those credits, then you feel like you have to say, well, we have the same rigor. We use the same classic textbooks. We use the same here's our syllabus. You see you have that. And so you feel like you have to pull back so you can get those kinds of supports in place that allow you to then bring in that math that's not considered in a lot of classrooms as math. Very interesting. Yes, the Press of the Peacock, I read that one as well. That was kind of the beginning of my journey and I know exactly what you mean. It's that connectedness there. And then when I was teaching at the community college that the oversight of the universities, because they will actually come to our meetings and say, what's in your curriculum? And they'll even want to come to see our classes to make sure it's implemented the way they would. Yes, you are exactly right. I had forgotten about that sort of level of oversight from state level into everything we do. And yet you found a way to integrate ways of learning and knowing. I met you first at the Fire Circles briefly. I met you in person last summer in Albuquerque when we attended the workshop together for the Pathways project that you had been involved in for five years. And I was just amazed at all the different types of areas of education that you all had explored. And so I was wondering if you might share with us some of the highlights that you got out of that five years of professional development within the Pathways and how that gave you supports, gave you ideas to implement different ways of knowing and learning. Through a grant by Achieving the Dream, a whole lot of us at tribal colleges were invited to find out about Carnegie Math Pathways. And a bunch of us went to some of the trainings in San Francisco and in Minneapolis. And our college, since we were relatively new and I was relatively new, it was only my second year teaching there. I said, well, let's try it. And they're like, OK, because, you know, we're small. We can that's one of the things we talk about, like it's easier for us to turn on a dime. And so we decided to go ahead and start using it. And the thing about it was that the trainings became more than just here's professional development and here's a training and here's how you use this system and here's the units and here's the materials and the content. But it also was a way for all of us in the tribal colleges, the math instructors at a tribal college to start to network together and to start to share our experiences and to start to think out about what is best practices and how can we adapt these lessons best to our fit with the missions of our tribal colleges. And so it became pretty rapidly something that it wasn't that you would just go to once to get the training, but we'd have these conferences where we were going to continue the work of improving our teaching and improving our delivery, contextualizing lessons, figuring out how to bring in that element that is in our mission statement, but isn't immediately obvious how to do that in a math classroom. How to teach mathematics grounded in the culture and language, but that was what all of us were doing in those meetings mostly wasn't about just learning the technical parts of math instruction, but learning the how we can share our ideas and how to improve our teaching and how to bring in the culture and language into, you know, even though we all are in different cultures and language, we all have that same challenge at a tribal college. Yes, exactly. And one of the things that impressed me, because it was something I hadn't necessarily thought deeply about, or you even went into how do we assess things? Because thinking about how to assess things, how to grade differently is a whole other ballgame. Right. I wasn't part of – we had these different working groups, and I was in the contextualization of the lessons working group, but I know there was another working group that was looking at standards-based grading. And I had been involved in some of that when I was a high school math teacher, trying to change based on mastery, not on just completion of summative of how many homework – how did students do on homework, how did students do on exams, how did they do on quizzes, average all that together, there's your grade. In standards-based grading, it's more you start with, well, what are the learning goals, and how does the student show mastery of those learning goals? And if they show mastery of those learning goals, then that's how you should grade the student. Meaning you give students multiple chances to show, and maybe different ways to show their mastery of it. If they took a quiz on – they're trying to show something like solving a two-step equation, some kind of algebra task like that, and they don't get it, but then eventually they do and they've got it, then that's how they should be their score, not, oh, all these attempts that they took where they weren't showing it. So that's the idea of standards-based grading, which is that you have to really turn upside down and you have to even restructure – you have to redesign some of the tools you use because a lot of your learning management systems are, here's all the different pieces of the – here's the different – the exams and the quizzes and the projects or homeworks, and then you just average all those scores. You have to figure out how can we change that, and I know that that group had a – you know, I was talking with them, they had a big thing, and in the past when I tried to do that, we would have to kind of set up a separate – I would use a separate Excel spreadsheet where I would put the student's grade in until near the – oh, well, now I've got midterm grades, so now I calculate those grades, but until then, their grade is not – you get a zero, it doesn't – if eventually you get a higher score, that's the new – that's the score. Right, good. Well, then I had forgotten the contextualized learning part because I know you gave a talk at the conference about that project that was very – maybe if you could speak a little bit about that. What was it like bringing in a context to a problem and such? So we really only got partway into – it's still a work in progress is what I should say. A group of us that wanted to work on this took suggestions from the wider network. We had a whole bunch of different ideas for how to bring lessons that would be in a different context than lessons about credit cards or bank loans. Some of the things that – the math pathways would try to have the math learning in meaningful contexts, but not everybody has the same life experiences. And so we tried to – ways that we could redesign those lessons. One of the lessons I was working on was exponential growth. And so the standard lesson on that maybe talks about, like, well, you have a – you buy a money market CD, and there's a certain percentage rate, and you're going to park your $50,000, and there's going to be compound interest put on it. And it's like none of my students are going to be – it was like part of the thing was they were supposed to then research money market CD rates. It's like my students aren't going to buy money market CDs. And so it was like this thing that didn't relate to them. But what we had identified as an exponential growth problem was the fractionation that has occurred on native lands since the Allotment Act in the late 19th century. And now today, because of that exponential growth, and because of the way that the Allotment Act was set up, and that the fractionation would have thousands of people jointly owning the same plot of land. And it might not have seemed to be a problem in 1887, but now over 130, 40 years later, it's a huge problem, and there's plots of lands that are essentially impossible to make any kind of financial sense out of them. So like using that to talk about here's this thing that has happened on so many places, and there's been this large issue of the land loss of so many – very few reservations have maintained their land base since the Allotment Act. And the whole thing of the land fractionation is a different way to look at an exponential growth problem, for instance. Yeah. So it's in one way the amount that they owe is getting smaller, but because there's getting more owners, so it's both sort of an increasing and a decreasing. Right, right, right. Exponential growth and exponential decay. Each owner has less and less – like if they were going to send you a check, you would get a few cents a year. Way more expensive, and then the government is supposed to be in charge of all that because these lands were put into trust, and they can't effectively – a lot of lands just become economically in limbo. Right. My grandfather passed to my mother such a situation. I think he owes one two hundredth of a piece of land, and so he's got a couple of inches that's in his name. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he'd get a check. Just like you said, maybe it took a couple years for it to get up to a dollar or two. Yeah. Very interesting. And that's – your students can connect to – that's a context. That's a context that a lot of them have experience with. Right. And yet, even though they may have experience, it's hard to understand. So now you're giving them an academic way to understand what's going on with this, why it's happening. And so it's something of value to them using that particular topic. So at the tribal college you work at, is there much communication between community leaders and the school and maybe the state? What is your interaction over a year's time there? One thing that's become really important is that the college created a position of cultural advisor who's actually a former chairman of the tribe who works now with us at the college, and he's also the tribal archivist. So he's like somebody who knows a whole lot about Red Lake history, and his job as the cultural advisor is to help the faculty and help the college generally when we're trying to figure out are there issues with addressing things? Are there things that we should be paying attention to in Red Lake history? When we had to scramble because of COVID and start teaching online, and it kind of made me think, I'm just going to redo a lot of what I'm doing. I wanted to teach about the birchbark canoe, which is a Native American invention that, you know, the Europeans showed up, they didn't have anything like that technology, and they appreciated that, appropriated it and everything. And it wasn't until the 20th century when they started making aluminum canoes that they would replace that idea of the birchbark canoe was the technological advancement over anything that the Europeans would have had. So I went and I talked with our cultural advisor, Buck Jordan, about how could I start to use this as something in my math classroom? And he immediately started connecting me with all kinds of different ideas, and he started referring me to books, and he said, I even know somebody that's built a birchbark canoe, and they got a birchbark canoe, and now we have it on the college, a birchbark canoe. And so I started making these lessons about the birchbark canoe. So in my math reasoning class, one of the topics is scheduling and how you create a directed graph with scheduling and how you create an algorithm to decide and try to figure out the scheduling and everything. And so that's now a lesson in what are all the different tasks in making a birchbark canoe and how some of them can be done in parallel. Some of them have to be done before others. Some of them take a little bit of time. Some of them take a longer time. There's a couple of great documentary films where people are making those birchbark canoes, and now that's part of the math game that I created where the students have to go through and pick what they want to do next and what's their next step in creating the birchbark canoe. Can they schedule it successfully without making the total length too long? That was something that came about because of that collaboration with our cultural advisor and being able to draw on all these things that I didn't have any idea about. Wow. What I'm seeing is this vision of you sort of did things backwards from how it would be done in academia. You went to the source first and had a conversation about it, and then you were directed to resources and looked up books. And we're taught at school, go to the library first, do your research in the books first, and then maybe find some experts. But in this way, you had a great number of ideas from the source of knowledge in indigenous communities, living knowledge within people. That's the library we go to first. And then, okay, we'll find some documentaries. We'll find other resources out here. And that's beautiful. And I would assume because you're working with natural materials, you can't do certain things too soon because the bark has to be a certain pliability. So you can't do it too early. You can't do it too late. Right. The other thing is that when I was researching it, one of the things I put into this math game was giving students the choice of the lashings that is used to help tie together all the different components of the birchbark canoe comes from the cedar roots. The birchbark canoe, all of it is from the forest. So the cedar roots then have to be found and have to be then made into this twine. So when you go to get the cedar roots, you could just find one cedar tree and just like take out all its roots. And there you have enough for the birchbark canoe. But then you're killing the cedar tree. So the more difficult thing, the thing that's going to take longer is to go to take one root from this tree and another root from this tree and that the trees then adapt and survive and continue. You aren't going to be permanently damaging the tree. So I give them that option and it takes longer. But then there's like I kind of help them out where somebody comes later on and respects their choice and gives them a little help. An elder shows up and gives them some help in making that the twine. Right. But all my students, they don't have any issues. They're like, of course, I'm not going to kill the cedar tree. I mean, it's a game. They're not worried about losing the first time they play it. Like some of those kinds of things, they surprise me with how they are able to immediately. They're going to have a different way of approaching it. Then let's just take the most efficient method. We don't care what happens to the tree. Right. So the industrial society says just get as much as you can today. But within the culture itself is this sustainability idea that directs the students sort of naturally. They know how they should do it, why they should do it. So the multiple layers of lessons within this, not just a math lesson, certainly it's there. But within that context of culture and sustainability, that is really amazing. I may want to contact you to get some more information on that. Okay. That is very interesting to me. So maybe we could talk a little about your experience with the Fire Circles professional development. I know you became a part of that and we had a nice, rich discussion. Maybe if you could speak a little bit about what you got from that and how we might be able to improve future iterations. I really liked that we had a more directed kind of discussions because we had articles and books that we looked at that were part of it that we then could mention the Crest of the Peacocks and also the mathematical enculturation by Alan Bishop and some of the other, a number of the articles that we looked at in the Fire Circles. Like it's important to be able to respect the scholarship so that you can say, yes, this is ground math instruction or higher education in a culture and language. That doesn't mean that we're bypassing or we're going around, that somebody that takes a college algebra class at the tribal college gets a lesser math. And so that's, to me, it was one of the things really great about the Fire Circles was that emphasis on reacting to scholarship, to looking at things, to discussing it out together. And the collaboration was just really great. I remember going back and looking at some of the Jamboards and just the, they're just like peppered, like just completely covered with all of the sticky notes and all the different things that people were saying and all the different inputs that I think it was Clara that was trying to keep up with all of that. And we were just adding and it was just like this very, you know, you could tell that there was a lot of thinking going on and that we had to cut it off at a certain point. It's like, okay, we're out of time, you know, but we're developing all these things, you know, save it for the next time. Having that focus is really important because being able to prepare for the discussion ahead of time and being able to have a new way to go back and look at that article again after we had that discussion, I thought that was really helpful. Excellent. Yeah, that was one of the things we wanted to get in there is we wanted it to be a development from within and that we would get as much as we could give as those of us who set up the framework. And occasionally do I go back and I look at those. It's amazing how much one little sticky note, sort of a cryptic thing, and then you look at it now and it makes more, you know, at the time it might not have made sense, but then you look at, oh, now I see what they were saying. Yeah. Having to put it in short thought. So do you see any systematic blockade might limit what you're able to do as far as being creatively able to help your students? Well, I think a challenge for me personally is that I teach at such a small institution that I don't have any other math colleagues. That's why it's important for me being part of this network through the math pathways and also through the fire circles was to just be able to share experiences with other math colleagues. Our college is supposed to only have one primary science instructor, one primary math instructor, one primary Ojibwe language instructor, and we have one and a half language arts. We have to then collaborate with people across departments, which is good. And I try to do a lot of collaboration with the Ojibwe language instructor. But it's a challenge then to say, let's do something new. Like, we're trying to figure out how to add calculus for the first time. We haven't ever had calculus. And we've had to say, well, OK, we're going to have to just not do this. And we're going to have to push ahead, even though we just have a few students ready for it. We can't hold off on it. We're going to do it. We've got to offer calculus, even though, you know, somebody else will come in there and say, why are you doing calculus? You only have a handful of students that are ready for it. And, like, we have to push for that. We have to, you know, so now I'm trying to think about that. Because now when I go to teach math, I can't go back to just here's Chapter 1. I'm going to teach you what's in Chapter 1. Here's Chapter 2. I'm going to teach you what's in Chapter 2. I'm already thinking about what elements of this, what of the history of calculus, what of the controversies of calculus, what of the – that's what I want to teach. That's what I want to include with the concepts. I want to include with where did calculus come from, how calculus has been part of the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the whole change in the world that's happened since the Columbian Exchange. And those are the things I want to get in there. And it's almost like I feel I need to be connecting more. But I'm doing these things. There's a few other people. There's like a handful of other people there that understand what I'm talking about. Right. So once you start teaching in a holistic manner like you have, including not just content, but the history, the morality, and the ethics, and the whole ball of wax, it makes it more difficult because you can't just pick up a new subject and just here's a book, because there is no book that has all of that in there. Right. And then how about professional isolation? Do you feel you get enough with your other colleagues? How do you feel about the situation? Does that feel you're still able to stay enriched academically and professionally? The other thing being at a tribal college is there are a number of resources available to try to overcome that. Like I was able to get a scholarship through the American Indian College Fund to take classes at Michigan State. And I took three classes in serious game design and research for Michigan State, and included I take a class from Dr. Elizabeth LaConsay. And I don't know if you know of her work, but she's done a lot on indigenous futurism and how to art and game design from an indigenous point of view, which was just an amazing class to take the game design class with her. And I wouldn't have had that opportunity if it wasn't for the kind of support, the kind of networking that through the American Indian College Fund to take that class from Michigan State. So there are those opportunities there. And my institution has been really supportive of me doing those things, finding the release time and everything so that I can take those kind of classes. And they've been really supportive of my goals to bring games and playful learning into the classroom. So I've gotten that support. K-12 system, you don't get that kind of support. And I don't know where else, if I was teaching someplace else, I would get that support either. I definitely have gotten that support. It's still being in a geographically isolated place at a small institution. I have to make those connections. And like the Fire Circles was and the Carnegie Map Pathways or when I can go to conferences, then I can make more of those connections and like have people that bounce ideas off of and hear what they're doing to enrich what I'm trying to do. Very good. So would it be fair to say that you need to put in your own initiative to look for these things? Right. You've got to go out and find. If it's not right around you and it's probably not going to be where I am here in northern Minnesota, then you've got to go find it. Or maybe it is there, but you've got to prod people and see who's interested and talk to people and they're not interested. Well, maybe somebody else. Go ask somebody else. I had one of those colleagues that he just wouldn't take no for an answer. I realize I take no too soon, and so sometimes you just keep asking until you get a yes, right? Well, not that you've got to pass the same people. You've just got to find some new people to pass maybe. There we go. Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, you filled in a lot of areas. We talked at the conference and everything, and I had no idea about the game theory and the way you've been bringing that in, and that's really such a beautiful way to teach. I do some work in Thailand, and there's a professor over there. He coined the term plurning or play learning because he always says you have to have fun, so it's games bring in the fun part, but you have to have the learning part. So he's got a rich body in Thailand of bringing in games to education, but I had never seen that word before, plurning, and imagine that with the birch bark canoe and scheduling, how that makes it even richer when you put it in a game type of setting. So I thank you for that work you're doing and pushing forward on those boundaries. So what overall, thinking of those who might be listening to this podcast, those who maybe are also somewhat isolated, what advice do you have to other math educators, whatever context they're in, to help them become more inclusive in their teaching and helping their students gain greater success? I feel that you have to start with the math practice standards, and here's some of that K-12 experience coming to me, before you look at the content standards. If students aren't learning how math practice, if they aren't learning things like being able to persist on a problem or they aren't learning about the need to look for connections or to think about precision, all of those great math practice standards, if you aren't starting there, and you aren't starting with how the students understand this material, then you can have a lot of great content, but your students aren't going to necessarily get it. They aren't going to understand it. One of the books, originally an essay and then was extended into a book, was Paul Lockhart's The Mathematician's Lament, where he talked about how so much of math classroom is students aren't really doing math. They're just learning the scales, sort of like. It's like if you went into an art room and they learned about color theory and they learned about preparing the canvas and they learned about all these technical things, which are great, but they didn't actually get a chance to make things. It absolutely feels like math classroom, people don't get enough of an opportunity to make things, to practice math. That's where I think all of us can try to figure out. It's harder because that's different from how most of us were taught math. Most of us were taught math in a very, the teacher does something, the student copies what the teacher did, the teacher corrects the student, eventually the student is expected to do it independently. It's harder to have an exploration model. It's harder to have, I'm going to make things, I'm going to make mistakes, I'm going to do things wrong, but then eventually I'm going to make sense of it myself and I'm going to learn the content and not just the processes. I'm going to learn more than just, here's the formulas, here's the recipes, here's the quadratic formula, I'm going to memorize it and I'll be able to use it and then not have any sense of what's the point of it. That's the other thing is in math, I think a lot of what's presented to our students is this finished smooth facade with no indication of how it was constructed and that's where the math history becomes so important because you have to realize that it took thousands of years for all these different people and all these different places around the world bringing math together to present math, this sort of seamless thing that you get in the classroom and you might think, well, I don't get it, I don't get it. Well, it's a whole record of human achievement that took there and there's a whole lot of scaffolding and all of the things that was all taken away when they finished it. You know, they removed all of that and it's just this wonderful bridge but you don't see how they built it and that's a challenge for our students then that we can help them overcome that or help them figure out how to learn those things that took human culture thousands of years. We're now trying to help our students learn in a number of, you know, in a few years. Or a few months. Or a few months. We've got one semester, we're going to run through the whole thing, we're going to run through college algebra. Very interesting. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that metaphor, that visual you gave about the art class. Who would say, would even call it an art class if they didn't produce a painting? Right. If they just learned the skills to make it but never produced one. That's not an art class. And yet, that's exactly what we do with math. We give you the skills but we don't ever let you actually make math. Very good advice. I've learned a lot. I thank you so much and I look forward to continuing to develop our relationship over time and our work together and again, I appreciate everything you've done and are doing. Thank you very much, Jeffrey. Great, thanks. I hope you've enjoyed this discussion and that you experience great success in your journey to draw out the learning from within your students, from within their culture, from within their knowledge, from within their being.