In 1978, when Uri Treisman first created the Mathematics Workshop at the University of California-Berkeley, he was trying to solve a local problem: although there were very few African American and Hispanic students in the freshman calculus class, those who were enrolled were barely scraping through -- when they managed to get through at all.
Calculus is critically important because it is the "gateway" to all the technical majors, including engineering. And the need for a technically sophisticated workforce is even greater today than it was twenty years ago when Treisman. now a professor of mathematics and director of the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas-Austin. originally conducted his research.
Before constructing a program, Treisman spent a year and a half studying in depth the lives of freshman calculus students to be sure that he understood the nature of the problem. What he found about the sources of these students' academic failure ran counter to the conventional wisdom of the time.
His research revealed that tile source of difficulty was not -- as was commonly assumed -- lack of student motivation, poor high school preparation, or socioeconomic background. Rather. the difficulty was the students' social and academic isolation on campus.
But Treisman did not stop at understanding the nature of failure. He went on to examine what it would take for students to succeed. He then built a program that would counter their isolation and support their academic success.
A critical aspect of this program -- now widely disseminated and known variously as the mathematics workshop program, the Emerging Scholars Program (ESP). MathExcel, and other locally determined names -- is its base within an academic department. While an institution's student-retention initiative may help students stay in college, Treisman was convinced that such broad programs would not produce mathematicians Rather, he knew that to develop students with a real affection for the content area requires the involvement of the faculty. Thus, two strengths of ESP are its academic focus and its strong faculty engagement.
