Thanks to the Lee and Arthur Herbst and the Herbst Family Foundation, teachers receive $25 stipends for their participation in this HEMS workshop.
[Grades 6-12] IN-PERSON ONLY. Cultivating & Sustaining Intrinsically Motivated Mathematicians (HEMS)
Too many students leave mathematics classrooms having learned that mathematics is about speed, correctness, and compliance, but this workshop offers a different vision of mathematics as a site of collective curiosity, persistence, and liberation. Informed by Dr. Cathery Yeh’s 2026 MEAD keynote and “Belonging by Design” sessions, guest facilitator River Reger-Bacca will explore how to co-design learning environments that sustain rather than suppress students’ intrinsic mathematical identities and cultural ways of knowing.
Participants will engage as co-learners in rich data science tasks designed to provoke productive confusion, surface multiple solution pathways, and demand that we listen to one another’s reasoning rather than racing to an answer. We will name how traditional structures of tracking, ability-grouping, and speed-based assessment have manufactured disaffection, and we will examine the pedagogical frameworks—rooted in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP), Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and the critical traditions of Freire and Ladson-Billings—that make collective brilliance possible.
Participants will leave with a collective call to action: to interrogate the structural gatekeeping in our curriculum, to center the cultural and linguistic assets our students already possess, and to redesign our classrooms alongside our students as liberated spaces where mathematical authority is shared.
- For questions regarding this resource, please contact Center for Recruitment and Retention of Mathematics Teachers (CRR).
- Phone No: 520-621-6866
- Email Address: math-crr@arizona.edu