Views of HE curriculum from ‘Young Researchers in Mathematics’

At the Young Researchers in Mathematics 2011 Conference [1] on 14th March 2011 at the University of Warwick I contributed a session, rather grandly titled ‘Innovation in mathematics HE teaching & learning’, which was peppered with periods of group discussion around teaching methods and graduate attributes. This paper is an account of that discussion, which I recorded with permission and made available online1. Young Researchers in Mathematics is an annual conference organised by and for postgraduate students and early career researchers, around 60 of whom attended my session. I didn’t collect institutional affiliations but you may have your own view on what sorts of institutions and types of educational environments such an audience may have experienced. This paper presents an account of the responses given to questions I put to the audience followed by some discussion of these. This is not intended to be a representative sample or anything other than an interesting set of views from a particular audience, presented to provoke thought.