In the rural college, the Lifting Pedagogy has helped to organize small groups of students.  The individual student begins to understand the enormous difference between what they have experienced in the past and what is possible now.  When the pedagogy is successful, as the semester proceeds, these groups open access to inner potential.

The focus may shift entirely from practicing skills that are not understood and are not in context, to comprehension.  The purpose of each lecture is to allow students to ask about any topic and yet to produce a lecture that addresses each and every uncertainty that any of the students might have.  This requires that the topic be explained clearly and that all students admit to following the entire explanation. 

If well supported, this community may attract other students.  The in-class support structure that is optimal includes good board space in the classroom, and the availability of novel resources such as the blank paper, three ring note books and paper punched with thee holes.  It would also be useful to have workshops where students and one professor may form a temporary class that meets for two or three weeks. 

We can compare and contrast two experiences at rural HBCU colleges.

At Talladega College, where I was Chair of the Mathematics Department (2007-2008), students had many barriers.  However, there was no active opposition from the faculty or the administration.  Over the term of the first semester a growing community of students began to increase in size until, during second semester, attendance rates were close to 85%, as opposed to the 40% rates in other classes. For the small entering freshman class of 216 students, 80% of all students passed the two semesters of mathematics as compared with 25% passing in previous years. 

The reason why I choose to reenter the college teaching profession at Talladega was due to the small freshman class size, and the possibility that all of the freshman might be introduced to the demand side theory at the same time.  In spite of growing enrollments, I decided to make a move to what I thought would be a better environment. 

During the Fall of 2008, at LC, blank paper tests were demonstrating increasing awareness and motivation, as were the daily notes taken by the students.  These daily notes are presented for a brief inspection each class day as the student leaves the class.  The attending students are asked to find those who are not attending class and to share the notes, allowing friends to copy these notes and asking friends to start attending class.  As was that case last year, average attendance in all classes was around 60%.  A specific proposal was developed to address the attendance issue, and will be discussed below.  At the spring break, the students were given the day off several days early, by the president of the college during his chapel session, and from that time on the attendance was around 30%.  With these attendance rates, and due to other factors; the Lifting Strategy appeared to fail. 

Specific cultural feeling were shared by almost all students and by many of the faculty and most of the administration.  These cultural feeling discounted the importance of liberal arts training in mathematics, and advocated a minimal requirement for passing through the two semester freshman mathematics classes.  No developmental program existed due the argument that developmental programs are insulting, and yet no provision for increased support for the freshman mathematics program was made.  Professors were paid at very low rates, were primarily working with green cards and were intimidated by an authoritarian administration. 

The Lifting Strategy challenges the student's belief that they can not learn mathematics.  As the strategy is deployed, what developed at TC was a type of community, where communication between students is enhanced. As mentioned above, the tools needed include a classroom board where lectures may be placed and blank paper that may be use to practice composition and eventually to develop a set of class notes and study notes.  At Talladega the boards were perfect and could be used with great artistic expression, convaying a love of mathematics.  At LC the chalk boards were in very poor condition, in spite of adequate funds to replace.  Attendance issues are not a concern that either college found easy to deal with.  One must understand that in the rural college, students have many difficulties.  Getting to class is but one of these many problems.  The use of topic mapping strategies allows students who miss class to nevertheless participate in measured progress from the often agnostic orientation to a positive participatory orientation.  However, at TC the students themselves organized around studying for my classes, and towards the end of the semester the attendance became very positive; almost no one missed class without appologizes before hand.  At LC attendance in all classes, not only mine, stayed at around 30% starting at mid term. 

When my colleagues and I have completed the web support system for the Lifting Strategy, supporting this communication is to be done using cell phones, mobile devices, and computers. Ideally the communication should focus on a specific topic, not a word problem, unless the word problem is seen as an exemplar of a specific topic theory. I was active for a while working on a proposal to NSF to fund this, but the president's office made no attempt to assist, and did not submit a letter of intent. 

At LC it was not even possible to make a campus wide announcement that these workshops were available to students, from noon to 2:00 P.M. each day.  Even through I have strong support from the mathematics coordinator and from the chair of the division I could not make the Lifting Stategy work.

On proposals to develop technology support for demand side theory

The descriptor set

enumerated the aspects of each topic. The notation required to communication about that topic is needed, then the general theory, and then the exemplars.

Supply side rarely addresses either notation of theory. 

The ideal web based system will allow a student to enter any phrase or word and either get a statement asking for clarification or a specific introductory topic.  This introductory topic will lead to one or more additional topics and may in fact to linked eventually to every other topic in the set

This ideal web based system will also have a linkage or mapping between

and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics K-12 focus elements.

But more importantly, the web based system would allow each class section to develop a text book written by the students in pencil on blank paper and scanned to the web.