Foreword

Abstract

This special edition comprises selected papers presented at the Swan DELTA 2019 conference, the twelfth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of UndergraduateMathematics and Statistics held in Fremantle, Australia, inNovember 2019. This is the eighth special edition of IJMEST to feature selected papers from the DELTA series of conferences, and as such, cements its role as one of the pre-eminent journals aimed at the dissemination of tertiary mathematics education research. The DELTA series of conferences continues to forge the valuable relationship between research and scholarship on current issues and practices in undergraduate mathematics education, supported by the IJMEST special editions that allow the participants to have truly international reach. The biennial DELTA forum brings together mathematics educators from the wider international community to share goodpractice anddiscuss latest developments relevant to the teaching and learning ofmathematics and statistics. Since 1997 theDELTA conferences have attracted university mathematicians, educational researchers, tutors and students to share the joy, successes, disappointments and challenges of mathematics teaching at university level. The name DELTA captures the concept of continuous change experienced by educators, and the 2019 theme, Reflections of Change, evokes the need to constantly research our practices to ensure we provide high-quality mathematics education to our students. In keeping with this broad conference theme, the 10 papers included in this issue fall within three subthemes, namely new and innovative teaching approaches, issues with how students engage in learning, and systems and programmes to support students in their learning journey. In recent years, research into new and innovative teaching approaches has had a strong focus on content deliverymethods including active learning and flipped classrooms. In this issue we see a change of direction with many pedagogical scholars shifting their gaze from the generic to the specific, focussing on how to teach particular mathematical concepts. Three papers deal with different approaches to support understanding. In one paper, Rowlett, Smith, Corner, O’Sullivan and Waldock seek to define what is meant by recreational mathematics and how it can be used to effectively support the development of mathematical learning. The paper explores the use of activities that incorporate play, for example, puzzles and games, to support undergraduate students to develop their mathematical thinking. In contrast to this, White, Carruth, Eastes, Scoville, Otero and Klyve approach learning in mathematics from a historical perspective, advocating the use of primary historical sources rather than textbooks to support student learning, building activities that reference the foundational problems that were embedded in the development of the particular content. Campuzano reports on the use of phase portraits to investigate singular points of complex functions. Using colouring techniques to visualize functions,