
Loyola Marymount University Assistant Professor of Mathematics Rachel Tremaine is contributing to positive change in undergraduate mathematics education via more humanizing approaches. “My goals are to understand how equity work is motivated and enacted in undergraduate mathematics education and, in turn, create more accessible, welcoming, and exciting learning environments,” she said.

Humanizing mathematics education means systemically creating a learning environment that respects, values, and takes into account students’ identities, experiences, and humanity while fostering an equitable and empowering approach to math instruction. This approach shifts away from traditional and impersonal methods to prioritize the cultural, emotional, and social dimensions of learning.
“I’m thinking about how undergraduate students are experiencing their mathematics courses and then using those experiences in the real world to confidently apply math to inform decisions and navigate the demands of daily life, personally, professionally, and civically,” said Tremaine. “I’m also thinking about the perspectives of higher education faculty and administrators that are influencing undergraduate mathematics educational experiences which influence the kind of practices and policies implemented in their departments.”
Tremaine has worked on several collaborative research projects focused on undergraduate mathematics education funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM. The current three-year, $1.5 million grant project is titled Achieving Critical Transformations in Undergraduate Mathematics Programs and is targeted for completion in spring 2025.

This research involves investigating how small teams of faculty and administrators at public and private universities are using data local to their institution to inform equity-oriented changes for the institution’s introductory mathematics programs. The research focuses not only on how they are using the data, but also how mathematicians are thinking about equity and equity-oriented change within their departments.
The questions the research is looking to answer include: How do educators and decision-makers respond to data that illustrates certain inequities? And what is the nature of the responsive stance taken when they choose to respond?
“As a component of this work, we are investigating whether educators’ mindsets were in a place of bringing folks into an existing system that was perpetuating its own inequities versus changing that system to be more equitable,” said Tremaine. “As educators, we need to fundamentally rethink certain components of undergraduate mathematics education to ensure we are producing more equitable outcomes for all students.”

Another area of interest for Tremaine is the use of arts-based research methods, which takes traditional research questions or problems and approaches them through creative practices. Instead of just writing or analyzing data in numbers, researchers might express their findings through art forms like poems, performances, or visual art. “My specific form of arts-based research is poetic transcription—the notion of writing poetry as a research methodology,” she explained. In a recent project, Tremaine used poetic transcription within her research outcomes to capture the personal experiences of multilingual students in undergraduate mathematics classrooms. The multilingual students were interviewed as part of the research, then Tremaine wrote poems from their transcripts using their own words. “As a data poet, you try to bring in really emotionally indicative and imagery conveying phrases from the participants’ experiences to showcase their personal stories,” said Tremaine.
Tremaine believes arts-based research methods provide a great opportunity to dissect our own subjectivities and how we approach the research, which she thinks is a more productive headspace than thinking about research as objective truths.
She earned her Ph.D., master’s degree (with specialization in education research methods), and bachelor’s degree all in mathematics from Colorado State University. She also earned a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.