Instructors’ Experiences With the Miscibility of Math and Communication in a Probability and Statistics Course

The University of South Florida’s College of Engineering made a commitment two years ago to bring on communication faculty to teach communication in tandem with College of Engineering faculty within two college-wide courses, one of which is probability and statistics. During this time, faculty co-teaching the course have significantly modified both how we envision communication’s role within the course and how we implement teaching with and about communication within the course. We started at a place of separate and respectful—both as instructors and in terms of our respective disciplines—and are progressing to a point of integrating math and communication to facilitate students’ conceptual understanding of probability and statistics while they also learn the math procedures and communication skills essential to the application of probability and statistics professionally. This presentation shares our story of the experiences, conversations, and teaching pedagogies that are leading us toward a class where communication and math are miscible in the learning experience.