What I Learned About Math(s) Education In Australia

I was beyond fortunate to have the opportunity to provide professional development to math(s) educators in Australia six times over twelve days in late November and early December 2023 in Brisbane, Melbourne, Bairnsdale, and Sydney. It was one of the best professional experiences of my life and I will cherish every moment.

I realize that this is not an opportunity everyone will have, so I wanted to share what I learned.

I have three big goals for writing this:

• I want to reflect on and process my own experiences in a place where I can come back and read.
• I hope that Australian educators might value an outsider’s perspective on what’s happening in Australia.
• I hope that educators outside of Australia might value hearing about what we can learn from Australians.

 

In the United States, there are countless math education conferences that happen at the city, county, and/or state level. We also have national math educator conferences like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM). I hadn’t thought much about how important this all is, but seeing what was happening in Australia provided a good reflection point.

In Australia, it seems like the only consistent, annual math educator conferences are at the state level. There do not appear to be any city or county level math educator organizations, or they are dormant or do not have sufficient marketing to be widely known. Their national math education organization, Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers (AAMT), is actually less prominent than their biggest state level organization in Victoria, the Mathematical Association of Victoria (MAV). AAMT used to have a biannual conference but hasn’t had any conferences since the pandemic. This creates struggles I haven’t experienced in the United States:

First, the lack of a strong national math education organization means that there’s very little cross pollination between states. I repeatedly found that math education leaders that everyone loved in one state were virtually unknown in another state. As a result, many educators were unaware of the ideas, resources, and innovations being created. How much better would things be for Australian math educators if they could help each other grow?

This lack of cross pollination is less common in the United States. The most popular math education leaders in each US state are typically very similar. In addition to interactions on social media, I believe this cross pollination happens partially because we see each other at our many annual national conferences and we then share what we learned with others back in our communities. This then amplifies those leaders so that they are better known around the country and get more opportunities to share what they’re passionate about.

This exchange of ideas also helps presenters improve their craft. Virtually everything I do in education has been heavily influenced by something I learned and adapted from someone else. I cannot overstate how much of my successes have come from being able to attend hundreds of conferences and learn both content as well as how to present from other educators. I feel bad for education leaders in Australia who don’t get those similar opportunities.

Something needs to be done at the national level to better connect educators across the country. I understand that it can feel like a national conference might compete against a state level conference. I also understand that the vast geography and how spread out Australians are certainly doesn’t make things easier. However, the consequences of no conference at all are even worse. Something has to be done. Maybe it’s the return of national in-person conferences that now happen annually. Maybe it’s still just state conferences but increased funding to have speakers from other states and territories present. I don’t know what’s best, but I believe that your collective brainstorming will come up with options that are better than what you have now.

Second, I believe that the lack of smaller local conferences makes it harder for emerging education leaders to start their journey and refine their craft. For example, imagine that you wanted to be a stand up comedian and there were no comedy clubs to practice near where you lived. In fact, the only way you could do comedy at all was on a Netflix comedy special. This would be terrible news for you because of course Netflix would want to prioritize the well known, popular comedians over the brand new, unheard of ones. So you may never get a chance. And even if you did somehow manage to get your chance on Netflix, if this was your first time doing stand up comedy, you probably wouldn’t go well.

The first few times I do a presentation, they are so, so rough. I have way too much material. My timing is off. My jokes are not funny. However, by the 20th or 30th time I’ve given a presentation, of course it’s going to be polished. What else would you expect?!

I love having local conferences where I can practice and refine new presentations so that when I present on a larger scale, I’m solid. Most presenters in Australia never get this opportunity. When they make a brand new presentation, they do it once at their state conference and then never again. I cannot fathom that every time I created a presentation, I could only use it once. I invest so much time in my presentations because I know I’ll be able to use them dozens of times. I wouldn’t be half the presenter I am now without the opportunities to try, struggle, improve, and repeat.

Something has to be done to give emerging education leaders more opportunities. Maybe cities like Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, and Sydney can have their own tiny conferences on an evening or single weekend day. That’s how it works where I live. Orange County Math Council (OCMC) has an annual Monday night conference with a keynote and two 45-minute sessions. It starts at 5 pm and ends at around 8 pm. Greater San Diego Math Council (GSDMC) has something similar on a Saturday, once a year. I usually do both conferences with all my new presentations and have maybe 20 or 30 people in the room. Less people in the room makes me feel safer taking a risk. As you can imagine, by the third time I do it, it’s already much better than the first and I feel more confident presenting in rooms with hundreds of people.

This lack of opportunity also creates a problematic cycle where prominent presenters (usually veteran white male educators) are more likely to be chosen to be featured because they’ve gotten the most chances and are therefore more experienced, well known, and polished. So this cycle keeps repeating as they get more practice, get better, and continue to be chosen again and again in the future. At the same time, newer presenters who could be amazing, will struggle to get opportunities to practice and shine in front of a larger audience. Their growth will be stunted.

While Australia’s expansive geography might not ever make this easy to do, education leaders have a responsibility to work together to brainstorm solutions. I believe that the leaders of every national, state, and territorial math educator organization should have monthly or quarterly meetings to coordinate, share ideas, and find solutions. In fact you should collectively form a Mastermind. You’re all better together than working separately.

 

A phrase I kept hearing in Australia was “Tall poppy syndrome“. It refers to the desire to criticize or cut down someone who seems to be too successful or who is bragging too much about their accomplishments, kind of like a poppy that gets plucked from the ground when someone notices it because it sticks out above the rest.

I get that being humble is important, and no one likes it when someone brags too much about their successes. But what are the unintended consequences of plucking poppies? Are these poppies truly being cut down because they were too full of themselves? Or could it be that their successes made others insecure?

Personally, I’m not a fan of plucking tall poppies. I try to live a life where I empower others and help all poppies grow. So while I acknowledge that one way of dealing with a poppy that sticks out is to pluck it from the ground, another option is to fertilize the other poppies around it so that they also grow tall and strong.

When all poppies are tall and strong, none stick out and we all benefit from the beautiful flowers. I believe that there is more than enough room for all Australian poppies to thrive and that Australian math education would be much more successful from actively working to boost each other rather than plucking the ones that stick out.

I think Ramya Deepak captured this perfectly:

Judging by the activity on twitterverse this morning, it’s safe to say #MAVCON has evolved into #MAS #mutualadmirationsociety 🥰🥰🙌 look what you have achieved @jenbowden33 pic.twitter.com/r34AeERYa5

— Ramya Deepak (@RamyaDeepak12) December 2, 2023

Why can’t it always be a #mutualadmirationsociety where we’re commending strengths and encouraging each other to thrive?

We also cannot ignore the associated systemic sexism and racism. Women and people of color are much more likely to be told to stay in their place and plucked as a tall poppy. This is pushback that white men rarely receive, myself included. No one has ever told me to stay in my place because of the color of my skin or my gender.

I wish you could all see yourselves the way I see you. There’s so much brilliance and I wish you were all able to see each other present and learn from each other like I was able to. I implore Australian mathematics educators to shift from a culture of everyone against each other to everyone against the world. The problems humankind will face in the coming years will require all of our best efforts focused in the same direction rather than fighting each other for the scraps that remain.

 

Australia and the United States both struggle to get underrepresented groups presenting and attending educator conferences. To explain what I mean, consider that the people at a venue should roughly match the demographics of the surrounding community.

For example, if children who lived near a school were about 50% people of color and 50% white people, it wouldn’t be surprising to see that its students were about 50% people of color and about 50% white. If instead you saw that it was 90% one group and 10% the other, it would make you wonder why reality was far from expectations.

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, approximately 24% of Australians are people of color. So, if there was no bias involved, you would expect that about 1 out of every 4 presenters and attendees at an Australian conference would be people of color. It was faaaaar less than that. The same is true in the United States, where approximately 40% of the population are people of color. You almost never see that kind of diversity amongst American presenters and attendees at education conferences.

Groups that have been historically oppressed, both in the United States or in Australia, are not able to level the playing field on their own. If we’re a society that truly believes in equity, we can’t exploit people for centuries and then pretend like everything’s fair now. If you’re wondering what leveling the playing field might look like in education, here are two of my attempts at implementing equitable solutions.

• Inclusion riders
• Equal pay for speakers

 
In related news, I cannot fathom how a referendum like the Voice did not pass except for continued racism and discrimination. The referendum was literally just three short clauses:

There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice;

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples;

The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

 
All it was proposing was that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders would get a chance to share their perspective on matters relating to them. It’s absurd that people would not allow them to share their perspective. This reminds me of the saying, “To those with power, equality feels like oppression.”

Almost all experiences in Australia I attended began with an Acknowledgement of Country, which is “a way of showing awareness of, and respect for, the Aboriginal Traditional Owners of the land where a meeting or event is held.” Voting no on the Voice made all the Acknowledgements of Country look like a performative joke that white people say to feel better about themselves.

The Voice referendum failing is shameful and history will look back on this moment with embarrassment.

At a minimum, conference organizers have an obligation to move from “How is it my fault that people of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander descent didn’t apply to speak at or attend my conference?!?” toward aggressively pursuing policies that level the playing field.

I strongly encourage leaders to use the Five Whys framework to explore this question. It might look like this:

Problem: We do not have many Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander presenters or at our conference

Why #1: Why is that?

Answer: Because they did not apply to speak.

Why #2: Why is that?

Answer: Because _________________

Why #3: Why is that?

Answer: Because _________________

Why #4: Why is that?

Answer: Because _________________

Why #5: Why is that?

Answer: Because _________________

If you don’t know the answers to the “Why?” questions, then that’s a big problem too and it probably means that you need to diversify your leadership. This exploration will almost certainly take you to uncomfortable places, but these root causes need to be examined and addressed. Beginning to fix the problems might include recruiting and mentoring underrepresented speaker groups and/or offering additional funding to participate.

I firmly believe that it is critical for Australian math education leadership to explicitly and aggressively support groups like the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Mathematics Alliance (ATSIMA) and their chair, Chris Matthews that work “to improve maths outcomes of Indigenous learners across Australia”.

I want to say this clearly: every state and territory mathematics educator organization has an obligation to proactively reach out to ATSIMA and ask how they can better support them, especially from AAMT at the national level. Just like with supporting underrepresented groups in the United States, it is not enough to simply stop implementing oppressive policies. We have to do the opposite and pursue strategies that begin to repair the harm caused. If we don’t know what those strategies are, then it’s a sign that we need to diversify our leadership, be curious, and incorporate missing perspectives.

I’m going to say this one more time. Don’t go another week lamenting how it’s a shame that Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders are not better represented in the Australian maths educator community. If you’re a state or national Australian maths education leader, reach out to ATSIMA this week and find out what you can do to support them. If you truly believe that your goal is to support all Australian maths students, and not just white ones, this needs to happen yesterday.

 

When I first got to the MAVCON conference, Australia’s biggest math educator conference with over 1200 attendees, it was the first time in years that I was at a major educator conference where I knew very few people. I hadn’t thought about it much prior to that moment, but in the United States I now know so many people at conferences that I’m almost always sitting with a friend. So when that was not the case at the opening keynote, I honestly felt lonely.

Fortunately, Australians are as friendly as everyone says and by the end of the day and into the next, I quickly had my Aussie math family at the conference. However, it made me reflect on how important it is for us to go out of our way to make attendees feel welcomed and included. In those moments, I fully understood why someone might decide not to come back.

This experience made me now believe that I was wrong about something. I used to think that we might have two or three conferences to try and integrate new teachers. What I now believe is that if those connections are not made at the first conference, new attendees will be much less likely to ever come back. We get just one conference attendance to get it right.

If we do not integrate and welcome new attendees, they’re likely to see conferences mainly as a place to learn content (which competes against staying at home and watching stuff online) versus a place that you can also go to make connections and interact with other passionate educators (which is much better in person than online).

I want to say this again for anyone reading this that is about 40 years old or older. When we first started going to educator conferences, social media did not exist. So, we went to conferences because it was the best way to learn new ideas. Along the way, we made friends that became family. Now we go to conferences mainly because they feel like family reunions and less about the learning that happens there.

It is fundamentally different for newer teachers. They came into teaching with social media already existing. So they don’t need to go to conferences to learn because they can do that on their phone for free from their home. So, while there’s great learning at conferences, the one thing conferences offer that can’t be found online is face-to-face community.

If we fail to integrate newer teachers into our community, we may lose them for good. They won’t see a need to go to conferences and maths educator organizations will slowly decline into irrelevance. I know this because it’s been happening in the United States over the last ten years. Fixing this may include ideas such as social events like happy hours or dinners (possibly even discounted for first time attendees). Maybe it means that new attendees can ask to get paired with a veteran buddy with similar interests and experiences that will show them around and introduce them to people at the conference.

I think that when the state and territorial maths education leaders meet regularly, sharing your best ideas on how to do this will give you a rich toolbelt of options.

 

Here’s a collection of smaller observations I found interesting.

• A trend I noticed (from a very, very small sample size) was that presenters who were active on social media were much more likely to reference ideas that came from educators in many countries including Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and England while those that were not as active tended to only cite other Australians. Could access to a broader set of ideas lead to more diverse resources and better outcomes?
• In Australia, they allow teachers to teach a subject without any formal training on that subject. They call a teacher in that situation an “out of field” teacher. I’ve never heard of something like that in the United States. As far as I know, unless there’s an emergency situation, teachers are not allowed to teach a subject without passing some sort of subject matter competency exam or taking a sufficient number of classes in the subject… and then it’s only temporary. However in Australia, it’s not uncommon for someone like a physical education teacher to teach a math class or a math teacher to teach an English class indefinitely. That has to be challenging for the teacher, students, and community.
• As far as I could tell, almost all attendees at MAVCON, Australia’s largest math educator conference with 1200 attendees, were Australian residents. While I did meet people who were originally from Canada and Scotland (shout out to Lorna McClory!), I don’t recall seeing a single person who did not live in Australia besides me. This contrasts with the United States’ biggest math educator conferences which frequently have international attendees. I don’t know if this is good or bad, just different.
• I want to highlight something I saw at MAVCON that worked brilliantly. Anyone who’s been to an American education conference has likely had the unpleasant experience of trekking across the venue to go to a session, only to find that it was full. Even if you find an alternative session, you’ll likely arrive late and tired. This did not seem to happen at MAVCON thanks to Jacqui Diamond. At MAVCON you had to pre-select the sessions you wanted to go to. This gave her valuable data about expected demand at each session which she could then use to adjust room assignments each day. No one seemed to actually enforce the selections, but because she had access to the data and used it well, rooms always felt like they were 90% to 100% full because presenters were in the right size room. I’d rather have 50 people in a room for 50 than 50 people in a room for 200.

 

It’s hard to describe in words how wonderful my time in Australia has been. I cannot sufficiently emphasize how welcoming and gracious leaders like Paulina Sliedrecht (Queensland Association of Mathematics Teachers), Jen Bowden and Mel Savic (Mathematical Association of Victoria), and Darius Samojlowicz (Mathematical Association of New South Wales) were to me. I basically floated across the country on a cloud of happiness. Because of them, I’ve made friends and shared experiences I’ll hold dearly for the rest of my life.

As you might imagine, I was thrilled when they all told me that they would love to connect with other international math education leaders who are going to be in Australia. It was funny to me because they thought international consultants would not want to come all the way out to Australia. However, I know that for most international consultants, presenting in Australia would be a dream come true like it was for me. From a consultant’s perspective, it feels awkward and presumptuous to reach out to organizations on another continent and see if there’s mutual interest.

So, allow me to play matchmaker because it would be amazing if other consultants had an experience like this too. While the timing and demand may not always match up, if you provide professional development to educators (and especially if you are already going to be in Australia), you should reach out to the organizations below to see if there’s mutual interest:

Jen Bowden (MAV in Victoria) – [email protected]
Michaela Epstein (Maths Teachers Circle across Australia) – [email protected]
Darius Samojlowicz (MANSW in New South Wales) – [email protected]
Paulina Sliedrecht (QAMT in Queensland) – [email protected]

If you’re a leader of another Australian mathematics educator organization and would like to be added to this list, please email me at [email protected] and I’ll be happy to update this list to include your contact information.

 

I felt very conflicted about writing these reflections. On the one hand, who the heck do I think I am to spend 12 days in a country and then share my opinions? On the other hand, maybe I can share a perspective that’s missing and especially maybe I can say things that others don’t have the power or platform to say. At a minimum, I hope reading this has gotten you thinking.

There’s no chance that I got this all right. So, what do you think? What did I misrepresent? What questions do you still have? What do you think I got wrong? What do you think I got right? What could I have said better or emphasized more? Please let me know in the comments.