Grantee: Dr Claire Blackman
Position: Lecturer
Department: Mathematics and Applied Mathematics
Course: Mathematics and Applied Mathematics
Degree level: Undergraduate
Open textbook initiative: Mathematics Textbooks for South Africa
Read about Claire's Open Textbook Journey
It’s about teaching, thinking about what you need to teach … you need to teach thought processes
The “Mathematics Textbooks for South Africa” initiative, led by Prof Jonathan Shock and Dr Claire Blackman in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at UCT, had two branches aimed at different levels of undergraduate mathematics.
Dr Claire Blackman’s branch of the initiative was aimed at developing a textbook for the second-year “Introductory Abstract Algebra” pure mathematics course. A variety of recommended textbooks had been used in this course over the years, but it was expensive, the content was written for a North American audience and it only covered mathematics development in Western Europe.
The previous textbook also focused entirely on content without providing any guidance on how to think mathematically and write proofs. The aim of Claire’s textbook was to include techniques for thinking about and writing mathematics, with a particular focus on making the language of mathematics more accessible.
Dr Claire Blackman was a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics in the Faculty of Science at UCT at the time of receiving the DOT4D grant in 2019.