Delia North is the Dean and Head of the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at University of KwaZulu Natal. She has over 25 years’ experience in the teaching and design of Statistics curricula at university. Her passion for teaching Statistics has resulted in her becoming a leading figure in South African Statistics Education circles, evidenced by being Theme Chair, Topic Chair, Session Organizer and Guest Speaker at various international conferences on Statistics Education. She is a member of the South African Statistical Association (SASA) executive committee, chairs the SASA Education Committee and is on a Council member of the International Statistical Association.
Episode Description
Educators are constantly rethinking the way they teach their subjects. Working to find the right mix of history, context, and subject specifics to help students understand and the importance of what they’re learning. Statistics is no different, stats professors and teachers continually looking for the best way to help their students connect to the subject. It can be a complicated process becoming even more fraught during moments of political upheaval or revolutionary change. That's the focus of this episode of stats and stories with guest Delia North.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington: Educators are constantly rethinking the way they teach their subjects. Working to find the right mix of history, context, and subject specifics to help students understand the importance of what they’re learning. Statistics is no different with stats professors and teachers continually looking for the best way to help their students connect to the subject. It can be a complicated process becoming even more fraught during moments of political upheaval or revolutionary change. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I’m Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist John Bailer, Chair of Miami’s Statistics Department. Richard Campbell former chair of Media, Journalism, and Film is away. Our guest today is Delia North. North is Dean and Head of the School of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at the University of KwaZulu Natal or UKZN. She’s been with the school since 2004 when she was appointed Head of Statistics. During her time there she’s worked to build capacity of statistics at the Institution as well as nationally in her role as chair of the South African Statistical Association Education Committee. North began her teaching career during Apartheid in South Africa which she says shaped the way she thinks about how statistics should be taught. Delia thank you so much for being here today.
Delia North: Thank you very much for inviting me. It’s indeed a great honor and I look forward to our conversation.
Pennington: Just to get us started I was wondering if you could talk about what that experience was like teaching during Apartheid, and you have sort of said it sort of helped you understand there was an urgent need to change the way statistics should be taught, so maybe you could talk through some of that for us?
North: Thank you. My training was primarily as a theoretical statistician. I liked mathematics at school, and I went to University to study mathematics and computer science, it was very new in 1977. When I got to University all students doing computer science were forced to do statistics. But statistics was only taught in the second semester because you needed a vast amount of calculus from the first semester to be able to understand it. So, I started statistics in semester two and immediately enjoyed it. As we progressed through the years of undergraduate had took statistics courses, every single one that I could, and I found that I was enjoying it much more than computer science for example, and eventually left computer science. And I majored in mathematics and what was called mathematical statistics. And it really was mathematical statistics. The University had a single large computer on campus which took an entire floor of a building called the Univac and you had to walk for about 15 minutes to get to the Univac and that’s what made me drop computer science actually and end up doing statistics because I thought it was a big waste of time to do computer science and I enjoyed statistics but all I needed was my calculator. I mean we never got to use the Univac if you were doing statistics. So I went on to do a Master’s and a Ph. D. in measured theoretic probability very mathematical I was good at it, I enjoyed it and I felt I’d made the decision to be an academic statistician where I would teach mathematical statistics but primarily theoretical probability; I loved it. Just after that, I got married I stayed home for eight years when I had three little boys and when I came back to my shock and horror, everything had changed. Univac was gone, everybody had PCs and the world was different. The academic world was different, but also Apartheid had ended just at the time and I was not teaching at what called historically disadvantaged institution and I was to teach many many students that had not had mathematics training at school. I don’t know if you know but during Apartheid the African schools were not taught mathematics. So, I had many students doing certain schools in statistics who had not been trained in mathematics. So, it was a whole new problem and all I knew was how to teach mathematical statistics well so suddenly I would lie awake really being concerned about this thing about how I could do this. It was really a worry for me, and then I knew about the South African Statistics Association, so I tried my own things. Training the curriculum a little bit too- even though the curriculum was in a mathematical way I knew I couldn’t teach it like that and I was trying to think of ways to do it so I joined the South African Statistics Association, particularly the education committee and I got really involved, and I did what I could locally but there wasn’t a lot of knowledge about how to do it better locally and we had heard about the RASE and I was on the education committee six international conferences on teaching statistics and I became the local chair or the six which was held in Cape Town South Africa and suddenly I was thrown into a whole new world. I got to meet all these people because I was chairing the local organizing committee and it was wonderful.
John Bailer: One thing I heard you just describe as part of when you were reentering into this workforce was in essence that you found yourself encountering students in this post-apartheid context where they didn’t have that kind of mathematical foundations, so how did they know that they would even be interested in statistics? And how did you- what are some of the things that you did in trying to connect to them and help them engage in the discipline?
North: What I found is that most of the students that I’m talking about that didn’t have a strong mathematical background they wouldn’t be in the program to be a statistician. They would generally be doing statistics as a service course. In other words, a one module statistics course to become a biologist. Well, one – yeah they were generally not science students. In fact, the students that chose to do statistics would have gone to some of the schools where mathematics was actually taught. Some private schools taught people of all races. Mathematics and then of course the white and Indian communities with the Universities open to all races. This was formerly a historically black university or a historically disadvantaged institution but most of the students were in the category that hadn’t done mathematics at school and therefore would be doing it as a service course where we would teach one semester of statistics to a student that might not fully understand the concept of percentages and proportions. It really was very very interesting. And but the service course curriculum had been designed years before and it was in fact for example proving based theorem in your one-semester service course. I mean it just wasn’t attainable and I couldn’t just change. So what I did, I put something in called hot seat which I called it hot seat because the seat is hot you can’t sit there for the day but you could book a private lesson with one of the statistics students and I got funding so that when you get some of the actual third-year honors, fourth-year statistics students to help the service course students because what I also found that was interesting I would stay for extended periods at our tutorial of noon where students could one on one ask questions but they would not ask a single question because they were embarrassed that their English wasn’t- we have eleven official languages and the students would not ask a question but the minute I get to my office at half-past four or five o’clock I’d have a row that want to come into the privacy of my office and ask me a question. So then I had the idea of having what I called a hot seat which just means you could book a private lesson like you book a squash court and you could have half an hour of one on one individual attention with the door closed, but it wasn’t enough.
Bailer: That sounds like a tremendous challenge to have eleven official languages. To think about trying to kind of encourage and manage in that context. Have you seen a growth in the number of students that are taking these kinds of service classes and statistics or in terms of the students that are in your school?
North: Very much so and what we’ve done over the years, what we’ve found very helpful is that we, for example, will get students of the different languages- say the local African students that are you know that was a long time ago, I’m not talking about 1994-95 when things changed but also from 2008 onwards in South Africa the education system at school level was identical, a new system came in in 2008 so for the past 12 years students coming into university have all had the same education. So now things are different but still, I find- and I’m glad you asked that language is a problem and that is why we have students of the different language groups maybe that are successful that could be because of what we call supplemental instruction leader and can be a tutor. We particularly don’t just take the best students in class but we try and spend the different types of students and that is how we handle particularly in the very large classes so that is something that we’ve found to be very effective.
Bailer: So, do you have all the instruction in a single language?
North: Yes. All the instruction is in English, although we have tutorial groups and we have what’s called code-switching they might discuss a problem in their language ad then we make groups and particularly in third year I found it interesting we have groups and I walk around the groups and the discussions can be in their home language but their presentations- yeah. And what I’ve found that I actually that I actually went to a talk on this once where they put cameras and watch people when they discuss a problem they like doing it in the home language, but when they do the problem it’s often- because it’s artificially- it’s not from the heart it’s more like the mathematics of how to solve it using which model, happily it’s done in English because that has been taught in English.
Bailer: Oh okay.
North: So, the discussion about what kind of problem it is, the general English what we would do in English, not when it gets to the mathematical modeling part happily everybody does it in English.
Pennington: You’re listening to Stats and Stories and today we’re talking with Delia North of University of KwaZulu Natal. Delia you’ve talked a bit about the sort of you know before this sort of this new educational regime was put in place in 2008 how the mathematical education was very uneven. And it sounds like sort of since 2008 there’s been some improvement, what other ways have you or your institution been involved in trying to increase maybe the representation of people from marginalized groups in the field of statistics, right? So, you talked about sort of this tutoring in the various languages, are there other things you’ve been doing to try to increase the inclusion of marginalized groups in this field in South Africa?
North: Yes, I’ve done that to what I’ve found to be extremely effective. Many years ago, I realized that the problem was often not just the students coming in from communities where maybe they were not at all taught at the same level, in other words, they had varying levels of preparation for University. The problem would continue if we couldn’t help the Inservice teachers. Because the curriculum changed. In 2008 everybody had this new curriculum but the pre-service teacherswould all get the new content and one particular day I was with this person that and I’d seen him and I just happened to be speaking to the statistics general and I didn’t know and I said don’t you work with stats South Africa and he said and it was just at the time when this was on my mind all the time how to teach Inservice teachers and I said to I said you know you’re pretty high up in stats South Africa and he said yeah, I’m the- are you supposed to ensure that the man in the street the citizen in South Africa can read your because I saw that in your mission and vision so how bout you start something- I’ve got some plans but I’ve got no money, how about you start something where we train Inservice teachers? And then we started talking and the next thing he made a program called Math’s for Stats, meaning the maths at school can help stats and he made me the Master Trainer. So, it’s a fun thing to do and then we had people that we had to train in every province and he took two teachers from every province virtually and eventually it was run through a program and I would fly up to Johannesburg and retrain the what was called the subject advisors and they would then, in turn, teach teachers, but it all was too diluted and too slow. So when we had in South Africa in 2009 I was asked to organize a teacher program because I then had got the name that nationally I was doing a lot of training and through South African Statistics Association I tried to get other universities and I realized that we could only do it on a large scale if many people were involved, people with knowledge and all wanted to do this, and then we had ISI in South Africa in 2009 I decided that I wanted it to be a lasting legacy and try and think of something that could make this big problem go away with other words how could I do it? And I realized I could only do it if I worked through the proper structures. So I involved Statistics of South Africa which by then had done a lot of training that they’d sponsored, that I had been involved with and also my university we were the University of KwaZulu Natal, we’d merged and I decided that- I spoke to my staff I was head of statistics at the time and I got almost everybody on board and I said decide which 300? If I just say- if I advertise, I’ll get the wealthy schools that have got bringing their people so I went to the department of education I said who are your 300 worst-performing schools in mathematics? You find the schools and I’ll go stats on Africa because I don’t have an admin to get hold of those schools because anywhere in my province- and our province is pretty big so I asked the stats south Africa to was on my side and he said they would do the admin and I said these are the schools, faxed them, every school must send a teacher and we had the most amazing program for five years and what was really fantastic is that the statistics department as a group would work with me on a Saturday morning and we’d run three parallel groups. We had the primary school, then we had the intermediate group, and then we had the senior group with other 10,11,12 and we’d work through the statistics part of the curriculum, and I learned so many lessons there. It only worked because no money exchanged hands. wanted to pay the teachers money and I said if you’d do that first of all somebody living close by will tell me they live in the north of my province I’m not going to police that. let’s tell the school’s here’s an opportunity and I will do it so well that they’ll be fighting to come back and I’ll do it very well the first week and I spent a lot of time and what I found was interesting. Teachers came a long way some of them told me that you’d get up at two o’clock in the morning because they don’t have cars they had to come on public transport to get there by eight. And they would just get them a pack of notes and by the end of it it was five cents away it only pays tens, and all fives would I give them a bound book with all their materials. And I would give them each little one to to the class and every week I’d give them a gift where everything was around fun activities to learn probabilities and I would give them the sheets and exercises and a lot of them were about rules of society and it was fun and the teachers got so excited they wanted to come back and then I would also do certain surveys to get certain information so we could do some modules and do some modeling on some attitudes, it was really a wonderful project and I found that if you gave the teachers a hot meal when they arrived and a hot meal at lunch and when I spoke to my staff afterwards after the first week so many said I’ll do it once to I’ll do it every week because it was such an eye opener for our staff and for us to see how desperate these teachers were and what they wanted was posters to make the classroom look pretty so I got sponsoring to make laminated posters and we’d give them big colorful posters with fun such activities on them and that just seemed to make such a difference that giving them little gifts not money and using the little bit of funding I could get to make their classrooms look pretty and they just absolutely loved it.
Bailer: You know what you’re doing is inspiring, what you have done is you’ve been a force to change the practice within your country and I just am really impressed I think that’s really cool so you know as you’ve been doing this what we see in our country and what we see around the world is a tremendous increase for statistics for data science for analytics you know just you name it basically in terms of thinking and solving problems with data that we can’t keep up you know universities can’t keep up that all sectors need this, businesses industry, government all throughout are just crying for graduates with the skills like you are helping your students develop and what you told us about is the pipe in terms of the things that you’ve done in terms of the Inservice for the people that are part of the pipeline that are coming into this. I also know about some of the things that you’ve done to attract young women to study statistics. Particularly things like the idea of the teas that you’ve held. So can you talk a little bit about what are the things that you’ve been doing to try to explicitly bring in. you’ve told us about the Inservice work with the teachers to help them prepare and attract and bring them in, what other things have you done that we might learn from?
North: I think what’s really important and what’s been of help to me in regard of trying to get more girls interested in statistics is actually when I’m teaching to look for the qualities that I would expect an academic statistician to have amongst my students- female students, because I need role models. And I’ve got three girls, in particular, I can mention right now but I’d better not mention their names that I noticed when they were second-year students and I would speak to them about possibly thinking about becoming an academic statistician because it’s a job with flexibility and it’s so rewarding and I would give them extra opportunities maybe in tutoring and then I would watch how they tutor, involve them in projects if we were doing a research project I would involve them in their third or fourth year so that they gain extra experience and what I found is those three young ladies are now young academic staff, full-time members of staff and are going to schools like when I did the women in analytics I never just wanted to be me speaking to young girls because I know teenagers don’t want to see somebody their mother or maybe even their grandmother’s age so I will speak to my girls about what I think would be a good idea but I don’t do it. I might give a short talk but they’re the main show and these three young ladies will then speak to the audience and I’ve also got Jennifer Priestly in from state university, she runs the Ph.D. program there because I think you need a wow factor and to be the high like Jennifer Priestly and then the three young girls talking and then mingling. We took a number of schools and said that they could choose two girls that they thought were outstanding and had potential and was interested in analytics but the teacher came with and I think it was important because those girls, I’m speaking to girls but I want the teacher to listen and the teacher must be female by the way, and she must listen and she must go away and inspire other girls and I’ve seen from the video of Jennifer’s talk and thanked them for coming a few months later and I think that was really important to sort of get the pipeline going and what really started was more I was thinking about how to help these girls but especially with the pandemic where the young people of course are helping us with the technology, these young female lecturers we’ve got are absolutely amazing and they’re helping all of us be more relevant and to be able to help us to keep up with the latest trends so I think it’s really important to have that type of example in particular we’ve got people of different races, young ladies that are awesome and are able to really be role models for the young ladies because we are concerned about the problem of young girls even thinking about statistics because what I’m thinking about one of our schools but we need much more. So recently and this may be adds to something you spoke of earlier on this is not only about girls but there’s a project I’m doing with one of the teachers that went to seven with me and we had this big competition and we had a group of teachers that were sponsored. They were winners in a competition that and they went to Brazil with me to with a group and we had a wonderful time. Now one of those teachers has continued with the idea of trying to bulk up statistics and he came to me and he thought of this wonderful project we’re just starting now where students at school from the township area which is really the areas where the less affluent local people stay, local African kids stay there. And they generally would not have opportunities and certainly, the teachers there would maybe not be able to teach statistics to the level that we would like so what they’ve been doing, they thought of this project where they have a poster competition. This is my school and next is this is my community. And the last one is this is my municipality have the whole area of Durban and wider Durban area, but they had not thought of using stats as a data. So we don’t do it with you I’ll partner it with you but only if the teachers on the projects get training because our group of academic statisticians were trained, we will give you posters and materials so not only the children are presenting but now we have classroom access to those- this is just an extra thing we obviously have a full program at university so we try always to train teachers and we’ve already got them into the lab, all the teachers got lessons on how to download the data so when it comes to this is my municipality this doesn’t mark a community in South Africa we’re down to a ward later so we’ve got the data because the plan was just to walk around and interview a few people and say this is my community. Well, you should do that, but you should benchmark it against what really is your community.
Pennington: Well Delia that is all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories, thank you so much for joining us today.
Bailer: Yes, thanks, Delia.
North: Yes, thank you, thank you for the interview.
Pennington: Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple Podcasts, or other places where you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your emails to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.