#  An Evolving Collaboration: Notes on an Immersion Residency 

 





July 11, 2016

 

 

     ![Agnes Voligny.](/sites/g/files/omnuum10866/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-10/20160518_GHELI_RG-AV-CSW-residency_7Da_Stills_007.jpg?itok=_PWj1b2w) 

 



 

 In late May the Incubator welcomed back Agnes Voligny, a mathematics teacher from the Cambridge School of Weston (CSW), to participate in a Faculty Immersion Residency. Voligny’s goal was to rethink how she teaches algebra to her ninth- and tenth-grade students. Working with GHELI Faculty Director Sue J. Goldie, Voligny outlined her goals for her revised course. She wanted to refer to a global health framework throughout the class in order to reinforce to her students the notion that algebra “lives” in the real world. Math is about so much more than just getting the “right” answer—indeed, it is a language through which stories can be told using numbers and graphs instead of words. Voligny also wanted to weave in concepts of social justice and illustrate how mathematics—particularly graphs—could be used to tell powerful stories of inequity and relationships.

 Through her work with Goldie and Incubator staff, Voligny refined what she hoped to gain for her teaching and professional development, and ultimately developed a rough road map for how to add global health components, including exercises and lessons, to her course. The process of working with others helped her look at her course in a new way. Voligny noted, “Talking it through with others and mapping the course to a calendar makes the larger goals of the curriculum clearer to me. I am rethinking how I plan days, sequences and assessments. I see possibility where before I had thought that adding on another project was an impossibility!”

 As part of Voligny’s professional development, Professor Goldie taught an afternoon class on probability to CSW students—both to demonstrate how global health topics could be integrated into the teaching of algebra, and to test some of the material that she has been working on. Goldie interweaved concepts of probability with real life examples of disease and testing generally, then moved on to a simplified Zika example that involved testing for the disease. Her examples helped students understand the subject matter in a tangible way: One student wrote to Professor Goldie after the class, remarking that “before I attended your workshop, I thought that probability was a very simple thing that is somewhat connected to a percentage. I did not expect that probability can tell us a lot about our life. But today I learned that probability is deeply connected to every field of science, and it is the essential part of them.”

 For Voligny, being immersed in the interdisciplinary environment of the Incubator was essential: “Working with Sue and the resources she has shared has been exciting. I am seeing topics that I want to explore further or share. I talked to one colleague about a possible topic for her Ethics of Science class that I found while at the Incubator.” Although only with the Incubator for the equivalent of a week, Agnes declared, “I have a clearer sense of what is possible through the global health lens and a list of physical deliverables I feel great about. I feel that the Incubator is a (temporary) home.”

 Voligny will pilot her new algebra curriculum during the 2016-17 academic year, and the Incubator will be working with her throughout the fall to refine her course. The Incubator is also partnering with other faculty at the Cambridge School of Weston to co-develop interdisciplinary global health materials for use in high-school settings.



 

 

 



 

 

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