can you teach diversity with calculus?

that's the $50 question of the day.

i go to these monthly teaching meetings. there's 7 grad students and a bunch of faculty/dean types. we talk about teaching workshops we've run recently, and then spend an hour talking about teaching issues. last meeting was about why students cheat, today was about the purpose of an undergraduate education.

it's a really cool group of people and i enjoy the discussions, but sometimes i feel like i'm an outsider. the other grad students are english, ecology (2 of them), sociology, french, and italian students, and the other faculty have backgrounds in education and in social sciences. there are occasional comments on how they don't understand engineers, and things like that. on the other hand, i much more relate to the engineers than to the social sciences, so there are points where i have no idea what to say even when asked directly.

case in point: today while discussing the purpose of an undergraduate education the following comments were made:

* "we teaching critical thinking, etc.,etc., with the goal of eventually getting students to do some sort of integrative research. i don't know that you can do this in engineering or math where they deal with the literature, but..."
(i interrupted and said on the surface it looks different but there are analogs of all these concepts in math too)

* "the engineering department says one of its objective to to teach students interpersonal interaction skills"
(the room responded with laughter, i was quiet)

or... on my mind most of all...
* "it's important for students to learn skills to deal with the real world. issues like diversity and time management should enter the classroom. but how do you do that in math, lara?"
to which i commented, "math doesn't open itself up the same way to a discussion of diversity, but then the skills like time management and study skills become even more important."
the sociology grad student said "i disagree. i've commented while running teaching workshops that it could be hard to make your examples come to life in the hard sciences, but my participants who teach physics interrupt and tell how they make concepts into stories of when such-and-such a bridge was built, or whatever. you CAN bring diversity into the classroom with your story problems."
i temporarily shut my mouth and let it lie because i hadn't quite formulated my thoughts at that point, but now, 2 hours later, i've been thinking:

the point of many disciplines is to teach critical thinking about that area. formulate your own opinion and support it. math and engineering are definitely NOT about formulate your own opinion and support it. they're about things that ARE black and white, and understanding where the black and white comes from. while i think it's important to build realistic examples in calculus class, even concrete ones that you can physically play with, i don't think a word problem should open up a discussion of diversity implicitly or explicitly. the point of math is that it is true or false and NOT up to cultural interpretation. i was a little bit shocked that someone from another discpline thought that those issues do belong in the math classroom.

i actually suggested the fundamental differences between math/engineering/hard sciences and the rest of the academic world as our next meeting's discussion topic. we'll see if it happens.

but really, what is the answer? am i closed minded about what the purpose of math class is? are the social scientists too broad in their idea of where social analysis should happen? i don't know.

i just know that i'm constantly amazed both by the insight other people bring to these discussion meetings, but also by the seeming lack of understanding between some disciplines. we shall see...

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