Message from the Director: Images of Equity
Welcome to 2025! To start off, I want to acknowledge that we are living in turbulent political times. PROSPECT S-STEM is still here and we are still working to learn how to better support STEM transfer students via co-equitable partnerships across institutions of higher education. We know information has been coming from multiple organizations; we have found these resources to be helpful: https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/trumps-executive-orders-rolling-back-dei-and-accessibility-efforts-explained and https://www.acenet.edu/News-Room/Pages/Trump-EOs-Shift-Higher-Education-Landscape.aspx. If your institution asks you to stop work on PROSPECT, we understand and do not want to jeopardize your jobs; we are moving ahead with our focus on propagation this spring.
Some of my recent newsletter articles have been about words, and how words matter. Images also matter (after all, a picture is worth 1,000 words, right?). In a different project called ACT UP Math (Achieving Critical Transformations in Undergraduate Programs of Mathematics, NSF EDU-2201486) we asked students, faculty, and administrators who have been attempting to use data to inform critical equity-focused transformation efforts to provide us with an image of what it means to personally engage in equity work. We said they could draw something, take a photo, or take something from the internet. I invite you to pause a moment and consider what image you might create or find to represent your own work with equity. If you search the internet for pictures related to equity, one of the most frequent results is a variation on what we dubbed “the fence”: showing people of different heights trying to look over a fence, and equity (not equality) gives people different things that they need to have comparable access. Access to education is indeed a component of equitable education.
However, looking more at these images, you may become uncomfortable or realize that there are problematic aspects of “the fence” as the ideal depiction of equity vs equality. I do want to be clear that my criticism of “the fence” as an image of equity is in no way meant to be a critique of people who selected this image. This is a popular image and probably most of us have seen it before, so it seems natural to think of it again. Some of my ACT UP Math colleagues--Drs. Kelsey Quaisley, Leilani Pai, Matt Voigt--led us to do an arts-based analysis of equity images and dig into what we found problematic about certain images of equity. If you are attending the Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education Conference (February 27-March 1, 2025), come find us during one of the poster sessions, to chat about this! Our poster is called Moving Beyond the Fence: Interrogating Problematic Images of Equity and Envisioning Inspiring Metaphors.
Overall, variations on “the fence” tend to put the problem on individuals’ biological differences--specifically height, which an individual cannot change. This is problematic, because when considering racial equity, this implies that people with darker skin tones are inherently unable to achieve without extra supports. The focus on sports can also be problematic in the U.S. where competition and winning are idolized, and participation is often restricted. Some images show the fence being removed or replaced with a see-through version, which does move in the direction of removing systemic barriers (which is good). However, “the fence” images are also about being a spectator rather than an active participant, which is not typically a goal of education! Two other authors who have also written about the problematic fence imagery provide additional perspectives you may want to read.
But if the fence image is not an ideal way to think about equity, what is? When I think about root causes of inequities, I think about system-level problems. For instance, we know that rural students have little to no access to calculus in high school (or AP science courses), which puts them in a situation of taking (and paying for!) more college classes than students from larger, suburban schools. But the solution is not to have rural students move to cities, nor is it to ask rural schools to all hire extra teachers (e.g., adding boxes to see over the fence). Instead, we need more creative solutions that challenge traditions and status quo, such as schools sharing an extra teacher who teaches in a hybrid fashion with some students in the classroom and others joining from other schools; online courses students could access while in high school; or providing rural students access to such courses through institutions of higher education. Challenging and changing the system is how we address the systemic inequities that lead to differing student outcomes. So, to me a metaphor needs to show changing the system as the equity goal. The imagery with the apple tree shows the apple tree ultimately being propped up and with apples on all sides to then provide equal opportunities and access to people (who are the same size as each other), which to me resonates more with the type of image I can appreciate. This particular image calls that “justice” and shows equity as having differently sized ladders; however, with the different ladders, the tree isn’t different, which means the taller ladder still doesn’t give that person the same opportunities since there are fewer apples on that side of the tree. A key step in changing the future and our education system for the better is to be able to envision what “better” could be. I invite you to continue to think about imagery related to equity, and to share images you find or create with us. What does equity look like for STEM transfer students?
