Renorming: Conversing with Dr. David C. Forbes

Shaw University Divinity School successfully navigated the gamut of accreditation, receiving reaffirmation from SACS along with our entire university, and being recommended for full reaffirmation, with no notations, from the visiting team of the Association of Theological Schools.  That latter one is not official yet, but we anticipate a good result when the Commission meets this summer.

We thank Dean Bruce Grady for his leadership during these years of self-study and complex change in our degree programs.  We have made and implemented a number of significant changes such as shortening our degree programs and reshaping the curriculum outline.  We have added needed faculty and begun work on more comprehensive plans for fundraising to increase student financial aid.  Dean Grady has been instrumental in all these accomplishments.

He did so well that the higher echelons of administration have given him a promotion.  He will now begin to serve as Interim Vice-President for Institutional Advancement.  We are proud of him and anticipate good things for the university and divinity school because of this new work he will undertake.  We are also sad to see him go after four good years of working together.  But God has not left us orphaned.

We are blessed to have the experienced and dedicated Shaw Man Dr. David C. Forbes as our Interim Dean.  He has been part of our divinity school family for many years, and he has been deeply involved in the life of Shaw University at all levels.  He was profiled last year during Black History Month, and I found the article very intriguing.  His work in SNCC and as a leader of Shaw students is impressive, and his many years of pastoring display an admirable record of service to God's church.

Dr. Forbes and I have a common experience that has drawn our hearts together in recent months.  He lost his wife of many years, Hazel, four years ago.  It was for him, as losing Everly has been for me, both wrenching and disorienting.  In a couple of recent conversations, he said to me that he has come to realize this time in his life can be characterized as "renorming."  The normal, of living a life shared with Hazel, has been taken away.  And now God's Spirit is at work to renorm a life, give it a new normal, orient it in new ways that both hold on to the good of Hazel in his life, but also point his energy and creativity toward new opportunities in this time without her.  Based on the profile I linked above, he had already learned some things about renorming when he led students to protest discrimination during the Civil Rights Movement.

That is an encouraging word to me.  I have already been at work theologically to address the notions of normativity and how assumptions of whiteness preclude understanding of other church traditions considered to be the productions of outsiders and marginal people.  This calls for a renorming, for the capacity to say as I wrote some time ago, that black theology's normativity also deserves acknowledgement.  Of course, that move challenges the very notion of normative theologies.  Figuring out the path beyond that challenge is clearly something like what Dr. Forbes is calling renorming.

Moreover, I have written repeatedly about the disorientation of life without Everly.  Having organized my life, in many ways specifically about helping her to flourish and succeed, much of that purpose seemed to vanish when she died.  I definitely had to reorient.  Renorming is a good word for it.  What is the normal that emerges from all that Everly poured into my life, now that she is gone, but also now that God still has a purpose for my continued living?  That is a renorming.

We have been renorming our understanding of our work at Shaw University Divinity School for some time.  The pattern that was succeeding through the early years of the millennium came face to face with the economic conditions that continue to keep the 99% struggling in this era.  Students are finding it harder to afford graduate school.  Educational systems have tightened up the availability of financial aid.  School loans have held high interest rates while huge, wealthy banks get their money for free and continue to make up schemes for trading paper and building houses of cards as a way to make more and more money.  People's homes remain foreclosed with little or no help.  Jobs are still too scarce, and the wealthy have become bolder in claiming that they deserve to be rich and the rest of us deserve the pittance wages they pay.

If we want to survive as an educational institution, we will have to keep renorming.  We'll have to find a way to provide education in the most affordable manner for today's students.  We'll have to make more financial aid available to them.  We will need to meet them where they are and remake ourselves in the form of service that is suited to our Servant Lord and to building a servant people.

So thanks be to God for both Bruce Grady and David Forbes.  May their leadership and ministry flourish in new roles, and may we see the signs of the Reign of God all around our distinguished, historic, and innovating Shaw University Divinity School.

Celebrating a Leader in Math Education

This week began with milestones to celebrate. Everybody knows about Tuesday, but that was the second one for me. On Monday, Everly Broadway, my beloved, successfully defended her dissertation: African American Achievement in High School Mathematics. It is a study of how reforming curriculum can influence achievement for all students, with special attention to the way that a better designed curriculum can benefit African American students. I am now proud to be married to Dr. Broadway, the degree soon to be officially conferred.

For some time, educators have discussed the “achievement gap” between minorities and white students in the U. S. education system. Many have focused research on the school atmosphere and the teachers’ ways of interacting with students. Habits of low expectations for minority students influence the ways some teachers teach. Research into different expectations of girls and boys in math class has led to significant insight into the ways teachers interact with students. Gender research has helped to bolster the recognition that race, ethnicity, and economic level may affect the expectations and teaching practices of classroom teachers.

Embedded deeper in the teaching of mathematics is a cultural assumption that only an elite few people are smart in mathematics. This assumption about a born elite has sometimes been referred to in shorthand as “the math gene.” So thorough is this cultural formation that no one is surprised to hear a highly competent professional adult say, “I’ve always been bad at math.” Earlier education research addressed the problem as “math anxiety.”

Dr. Broadway has been driven by, among many issues, the way that this view of mathematics is so thoroughly naturalized in the culture at large, and particularly in the culture of education. I don’t know how many times she has asked me questions like: “Why do people think it’s fine for only 10% to succeed in math? Why would teachers be satisfied to assume that almost all students in high school cannot learn math?”

Based on her findings, this is not the assumption of many other education systems in other parts of the world. Moreover, where the education system does not assume “the math gene,” teachers, mathematicians, administrators, and school counselors take on the challenge of conducting research and finding ways to do a better job of teaching math to all students. If you already believe that 90% will not be able to cut it, that puts the whole system off the hook for not doing better at bringing all students up to the standard.

Dr. Broadway has taken up with civil rights veteran activists and historians, such as Bob Moses, Charles Cobb, and Charles Payne, and mathematician and educational reformer Carol Malloy, sharing their cause of analyzing and closing the achievement gap in mathematics. They have described access to courses in higher mathematics as one of the great civil rights struggles of this era. Part of the problem is that too many schools have designed their math curriculum to delay or discourage students from starting to take higher math courses. Along with the structural barriers, so many families and neighborhoods are full of discouraged people who fear that since they had a hard time in math, their children will not be good at it. As with any struggle to open up opportunity, there is the need to change both the structures of power and the hopes of those who have not had access.

How often have teachers, frustrated that a student does not quickly “get it” in algebra class concluded that the student just does not have what it takes to succeed in math? How often have teachers, who found math easy as students, assumed that the way they were taught must be the best or only way to teach math courses? How often have well-meaning school counselors discouraged students from taking higher math courses on the assumption that they would find them too challenging and probably fail? How often have school administrators made judgments about tracking students into lower math courses because they are used to seeing certain groups do poorly in math? How often has the motivation to push more students into learning higher math been undermined in part by the conflicting short-term goal of keeping scores up on high-stakes tests in algebra and geometry?

Dr. Broadway’s research looks at new ways of designing high school math curriculum which show promise in helping all students achieve in math. Her research shows that when African American students are given opportunities to take higher level math courses, they can succeed in them. It shows that the curriculum design which links mathematics to real problems from science, from professions, from economics, from public policy—from the kinds of things that matter to human living—students who have been assumed not to be capable of “getting it,” can “get it.” Better math curriculum design delivered to all students makes “the math gene” appear as what it is—a myth. School systems committed to success in math for all students can make headway across the board, and the achievement gap can be narrowed. Over time, perhaps it can even disappear.

Dr. Broadway’s research examines the qualitative research, and has much promise to offer in this area. At its core, however, it is a quantitative study of achievement. The results on the initial high school math course leave no doubt. Better courses can improve math learning for African American students, and they can make a dramatic difference in a short time.

The disappearance of the achievement gap probably will not be immediate, but it is not so far away as most would assume. Much effort is being proposed and even carried out to make sure that children of all economic levels get a good start in school from an early age. Finding ways to back away from the industrial sized schools toward more high-touch schools closer to where children live is gaining momentum. Linking education to mentoring, internships, and specialized training is making a comeback. Changing our ways of thinking about math learning is an important next step. Dr. Broadway is committed to opening the doors so that “every child can achieve in higher mathematics.” I have heard her say those words hundreds of times, and it is her passion. There are many reasons why these words are true, and the rest of us need to join her to see that this mission will be carried forward.