Breaking out of inertia: How can curriculum, pedagogy and assessment celebrate a more dynamic experience of calculus?

Calculus is a formidable toolbox for the study of change. Yet, at a time when digital technologies provide the capacity to create and celebrate dynamic experiences of calculus, institutional and other challenges may impede embracing this capacity in its curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. In many high stakes assessment systems, for example, coursework, formative testing and closed-book examination tasks seem to be stuck in the pre-digital age. Systemic inertia seems to manifest itself in other ways too. Calculus is needed in different shapes and forms in the different disciplines and professions; yet, it is typically introduced to students in disciplines other than mathematics without due regard to the needs of the discipline. And, even though students often find calculus challenging and irrelevant—and, consequently, may disengage with it—it is still offered, unchanged, to them devoid of the raison d’être for using calculus in their disciplines. The panelists will first, and briefly, share their experiences in the study and design of curriculum and assessment materials for calculus. Then, in the second and longer part of the panel session, through examples from those experiences, they will map out one possible way of fostering change: designing tasks—for classroom activity as well as assessment—that convey important meanings of calculus, are accessible, celebrate its dynamism, and are tailored to the needs of students in various disciplines who will soon enter diverse worlds of work.