The myriad stories told about the University of Oxford, coupled with its status as an ancient, elite university, are often grand yet most actively exclude the experiences of women of colour students. I argue that by exploring the intersections of race and gender alongside other axes of oppression, a more comprehensive current history of Oxford can be told by and for women of colour students. My doctoral research explores the lived experiences of women of colour students through their participation in and engagement with student activism movements. Through a mixed qualitative methods study using narrative interviews with 47 former and current women of colour students and critical ethnography with two student organisations, this project foregrounds the voices of women of colour students and how they view their interactions and leadership within student activism that then shape their emerging identities. The research examines key themes of feminist action, spatial politics, identity and meaning-making, and the inherent possibilities forged through solidarities committed to social justice. I posit that there is strength in collective action and solidarities in service of change within and beyond the higher education academy in the United Kingdom. Given the recent global wave of action across universities for Palestinian liberation, including at Oxford, the need to challenge the University’s traditional patriarchal and colonial foundations is essential. My research seeks to situate women of colour students as central actors in critical junctures of social change that have wide-ranging impacts on the broader UK higher education sector.
This research aimed to find out the differences in how students (with a baseline knowledge of calculus from school) understand and approach calculus depending on whether or not they have studied preliminary courses in Analysis and Calculus.
In this seminar, I focus on the use of cognitive interviews to assess students’ understanding of calculus-related keywords, but also how they approach some calculus problems. In the first, I sought to establish what they think of when they hear/read the keywords and what they relate to in their minds, and for the second I wanted to see what tools they have to tackle calculus problems and what their thought process is. This approach combines a set of fixed questions, prompts, and clarifications to try and obtain as detailed responses as possible, drawing on ideas from think-aloud interview techniques. The calculus context raises a particular challenge for the use of cognitive interviews as this mathematics is more easily communicated through symbols, and thinking aloud processes are generally combined with written notes that do not have a linear form (cannot be read from left to right) and can appear messy and chaotic to others.
As a student who is blind, I worked with a support worker to carry out these interviews and some of the analysis, this included developing gestures to communicate participant activity in the interviews, developing ways to make the written data accessible for analysis, supporting with transcription of data, and practical assistance with use of analysis software.
I will also present some of my findings arising from the Thematic Analysis, as described by Braun & Clarke, of the accessible forms of the data from my interviews and draw conclusions of an overall picture and a comparison of students with different levels of calculus education.
