“It is very humbling to receive this award, because when you look at past recipients, I can’t even shine a light to it. Margaret Sinclair was a powerhouse of mathematics education; her work was very impressive and she made many contributions to the MathEd Forum,” she says.

The awards committee would beg to differ on Dr. Burazin’s self-assessment. Nomination letters described her as a “major force behind creating, organizing, and running important mathematics teaching and learning communities for practice that are having important and far-reaching outcomes,” as well as “a leader on the national stage within the education side of the Canadian mathematics community.”

As a champion of community building and improving communication, the committee pointed to her impactful work co-organizing the First-Year in Mathematics and Statistics in Canada (FYMSiC) project and her contributions to the Canadian Mathematical Society’s Education Committee.

The FYMSiC project began as a forum for educators teaching first and second-year math and stats courses at Canadian universities to come together and address challenges, and became a lifeline for many during the Covid-19 lockdowns. The meetings are a place where she and her colleagues can share what they’re doing with their courses, research and outreach activities, so others can be inspired and incorporate new ideas into their work. “Having these communities is important for one’s own personal development,” she explains. “It brings me joy when individuals feel they’re a part of something and they’re not alone.”

Dr. Burazin also helps maintain the website, where the group can access resources, and publishes a newsletter with tons of information about activities, events and articles relating to the subject matter.

It’s not surprising that Dr. Burazin’s community-building efforts have succeeded. Her research focus centres around communication, the fundament of any organic group effort. Specifically, she is interested in understanding what happens for students in the transition between high school and post-secondary mathematics classes.

While learning gaps tend to vary from student to student, there is enough of a trend where individuals entering university are struggling to catch up to the foundational concepts taught in first-year classes. She has run numerous studies to try and understand where those gaps come from, how courses can be designed to bridge them, and ways to improve the literature around numeracy.

“Sometimes I feel that gap is getting bigger as we go along. Some of our incoming high school students might not have the necessary background of mathematical preparation. It’s up to us as university instructors to understand how we can help and get these students on the same page,” she says.

It’s true that mathematics has a language problem, from the way it’s discussed outside of academia (“too hard,” “boring,” “not for girls”) to the way textbooks are written. Dr. Burazin is interested in coming up with ways to better explain mathematical concepts, from reducing ambiguity in the way problems are set out to finding clearer, more engaging language to help instructors teach various concepts and students to read them.

To date, she has co-written and edited several mathematics and statistics textbooks and has published and presented papers on various issues in the transition that touch on these topics. She is also working as a researcher on a SSHRC-funded Health Numeracy project, where the goal is to create a theoretical conceptualization of health numeracy, and then apply it to build online teaching modules to the benefit of health care professionals and students in health-related fields, and ultimately the general public.

An educator’s work may seem classroom-centric, but the stuff that happens there ultimately influences the world around us. For understanding the fundament of words in the ability to improve numeracy and, ultimately, build community around mathematics, Dr. Burazin has indeed “shone a light to it.”