Gloria ford gilmer biography
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When she saw the academic community working fruitlessly to solve problems for minorities in mathematics, she offered her cultural expertise.
Maybe the word will get out and we’ll start to realize it’s not as hopeless as it looks, there’s work in this area that’s already been done.”
In 2020, the AMS established the Claytor-Gilmer fellowship in order to further excellence in mathematics research and help generate wider and sustained participation by Black mathematicians.
But she envisioned a darker future as well, one where an innovative new resource again fell largely into the hands of those that needed it the least.
Gilmer shared these critiques and solutions widely, through publications and workshops, conference papers and conversations. D’Ambrosio’s distinction between learned mathematics and ethnomathematics proved useful to her as well.
ISGEm strives to increase our understanding of the cultural diversity of mathematical practices. Gilmer had long made the National Association of Colored Women’s Club’s motto, “lifting as we climb,” a constant refrain. So that’s a little bit frustrating but, that’s the beauty of having her papers at the Library of Congress.
She co-authored two mathematics research articles with Luna I. Mishoe that were the first two (non-Ph.D. Now she began to codify her teaching philosophy, thinking more critically about her earliest years in front of the blackboard when she mimicked her own teachers and blamed her students when they failed. Ethnomathematics, on the other hand, examines how different cultures conceptualize, communicate, and apply mathematical ideas in their everyday life.
She was the first president of the organization and also served on the Executive Board. But she was also known for understanding the power mathematics could have in building a more just and equitable world. Already a leader focused on educational policy at a national level, in the early 1980s she encountered the ethnomathematics movement, and thereafter her focus turned increasingly toward global intersections of math and culture.
Her mother, Mittie Ford (née Hall), had been a teacher in her native Georgia, but left home to study business in New York. Gilmer’s career, and her activism, bridged both periods. Gilmer was recently featured in the February 2020 Black Girl MATHgic subscription box. She insisted that students were capable of drawing mathematical concepts from culture and nature, and emphasized the power of math skills to generate community wealth.
Computers, she believed, could empower students to solve ever more complex problems, to use “inductive approaches that motivate mathematical conjecturing,” and to discover graphical interfaces that would help sharpen their intuition and foster a liberating mathematical experimentation. In 1963, she attended the March on Washington. There, in her junior year, she encountered Clarence Stephens, whom she later credited with teaching her “how to learn mathematics.”Footnote2 Some of the staples of his pedagogy, flexibility with teaching methods, avoiding lecturing, and a conviction that, as Stephens later put it, “I could teach mathematics effectively to most of my students only if I were successful in protecting and strengthening their self-esteem,” later emerged as core elements of Gilmer’s teaching as well.
A 1940 report by the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper found students in dilapidated portable buildings infested with rats and filth, an elementary school equipped with only chemical toilets, and several schools operating in long-condemned buildings. 6 (1956), 271--278.
I had help from Gloria Gilmer in preparing this web page.