BATESVILLE — Audrey Wood, who has been a math instructor at the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville for a year, has been selected to join the 10th cohort of the American Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges’ Project ACCCESS.
“ACCCESS stands for advancing community college careers: education, scholarship and service,” Wood said.
The American Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges is an organization dedicated to the improvement of education in the first two years of college mathematics in the United States and Canada.
As a part of the 10th cohort, Wood said, she will work with fellow math instructors from across the country to develop an experiment to help students learn in their classrooms.
“I feel like it’s a big deal,” Wood said. “I’m excited about a group of 30 instructors from across the nation. It’s going to be very diverse.”
She said she looks forward to hearing about techniques other teachers use in their classrooms to help their students learn.
“As an instructor, you can have doubts, and it’ll be nice to talk to other people who are having those same doubts,” Wood said.
This project is unique because it is geared specifically toward new teachers.
“I’m going to get to work with this group who is just like me,” she said.
Participants in Cohort 10 must be in their first, second or third year of their first full-time, renewable position at any community college.
To qualify for Cohort 10, teachers must have a master’s degree or higher in mathematics, mathematics education or a related field with significant course work in graduate-level mathematics, according to the ACCCESS website.
Wood, along with the 30 other instructors, will work together for two years to develop their experiment.
“It could be something simple like instigating a new technique in the classroom and seeing how it goes,” Wood said. “It’s like a thesis, but not as intense.”
The teachers’ individual projects will be determined at the conferences in the fall, but Wood looks forward to sharing and developing ideas with the members in the 10th cohort.
She will attend a conference Oct. 21-Nov. 3 in Anaheim, Calif., and another conference in Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 13-16 to meet with the other fellows selected for the cohort.
Wood isn’t the first instructor from UACCB to receive this honor.
“My boss, Douglas Muse, was in the first cohort, and he encouraged me to apply for [the 10th cohort],” Wood said.
Other than Muse and herself, Wood said, she doesn’t know of another instructor from Arkansas who has been selected to a cohort of the American Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges’ project.
Wood said she is more than excited about her upcoming venture as a member of the 10th cohort.
“There’s no downside to it,” she said. “There will be work involved, and it’ll be a challenge, but everything about it is exciting.”