Teaching Assistant Introduction to FYWPs
“First-year
teaching assistants (TAs) are introduced to the FYWP and their new jobs at a
three-day orientation prior to the start of the fall semester. At orientation,
new teachers participate in workshops on grading and classroom management and
are introduced to the syllabus they much teach during their first semester” (Restaino
3).
The concept of
this orientation, though informational, reduces pedagogy and first-year writing
to bupkis! Ultimately, I feel as though informing teaching assistants of their
responsibilities in this way—a three-day, pedagogy excursion— produces damage
that is two-fold. Approaching the program in this way:
1.
Delegitimizes
the field that scholars who belong to it have been working to protect for ages.
To treat composition studies, pedagogy, and student assessment in this way, is
to abuse the trust that students place in their institutions to instruct,
inform, and advance their learning (that is not to say that teaching assistants
do not have anything to offer, but it is to comment on the non-existent “sale
price” of student tuition for teaching assistant instructors v. veteran
professors and doctors of the field).
2.
Injures
a teaching assistants current and future repertoire and respect for
procedural/strategic knowledge, knowledge organization and originality
(template syllabi), as well as instructor responsiveness and adaptation. Three
days is not enough time for incoming graduate students to learn the procedural
knowledge of teaching and pedagogy. How can you begin to articulate the great
pedagogues that are Freire, Giroux, Hess, McAvoy, and Dewey, and/or those of composition
that are Berlin, Fulkerson, Bizzell, Murray, Porter, J. Harris, and not only
articulate their reigning principles, but assess and evaluate one’s stance as
it relates to philosophy and first-year writing if you are given only but three
short days of collaborative workshopping? (You can’t.)
As a graduate
student who studies nineteenth-century minority resistance texts (social non-conformity
v. linguistic non-conformity) and who serves as a teaching assistant to Ball
State’s FYWP, I feel as though I often cannot articulate enough my feelings of
such inadequacies.
Though I am
interested in curriculum studies and I am grateful for the opportunity to hone
my Rhetoric and Composition craft, learning its introductory contents should
not occur as I am instructing first-year writing students during what may very
well possibly be their last and final experience with writing/composition.
Answers? Oh, I
have none. I have come to critique and to complain, not to fix. Perhaps soon
though, I will revisit these same thoughts, using my animosity to inform future
remedies.
Kelli,
ReplyDeleteYour points are well taken and deeply felt. I don’t have the answers to fix the systemic issues that lie at the heart of the rhet/comp training ground for graduate students and new teachers either, but I can sympathize with the sentiment of wanting to change them.
My master’s degree preparation was a lot like the one in the book we read. I had plenty of experience reading literature and theoretical criticism, but I was in no way prepared to teach. Despite this, I was hired as an adjunct my first semester out of school to teach a variety of intro level English courses, none of which were in my specialty area. Some were last minute assignments in which the textbooks and syllabi were preordained, and others had no guiding information whatsoever. Both were terrifying and frustrating prospects.
I was told to think of adjunct teaching like a medical residency, where the pay is low, and the hours are long, but the experience is invaluable. My only thought about this advice was that successful medical residents get to become doctors at some point, but that no amount of effort would improve the state of the depleted system in which I found myself.
After a couple of years, I shifted into a few satisfying higher ed admin positions that were outside of the field of English. They supplied the dignity (not to mention health benefits) I needed that the academic purgatory of adjunct teaching was never going to provide. It’s still hard for me to totally understand a system in which the most inexperienced teachers are matched with the most inexperienced students with the least amount of resources, but as long as the system sustains itself, it’s hard to see a change in sight. Sorry I couldn’t offer more productive answers or positive advice.
Thanks for your insightful post.
Mary
Hi Kelli,
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of this comes from the shift of an institution as a place of higher learning to a business. Universities across the country, including Ball State, are frantically trying to retain and increase their student population (part of getting rid of the SATs was for this purpose, I believe). Universities want as many students as possible, which leaves tens of thousands of students needing instructors that the university doesn't want to pay for (across all disciplines...think about who teaches labs and recitations for biology, for example...TAs). The only way that we could get the true attention that these fields deserve is to change the entire purpose of college education in America. I'm not saying that we shouldn't, it's definitely a growing issue, but I think it goes beyond critique of the WP.
Kelli,
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of us are really starting to get frustrated with the model of the university, as it does act like a business, rather than a place of education and learning. Like yourself, I do not have any answers in terms of how to fix this, as how can we really fix something that was built on a foundation of oppression and exclusion without having to fully break it?
Abbie
I would have to agree that the model for teaching FYC in most universities is not perfect (what is?). I can’t visualize what it would be like to go into teaching in that manner. It was already nerve-wracking enough as it is. I think that’s just the thing about systems in general: It takes a lot of time and testing and slow (but hopefully steady) improvement. It really is those tiny changes that make the system better and I wholeheartedly believe that the best way to change any system is from the inside.
ReplyDeleteI am also interested with what Mary said about the most inexperienced teachers being matched with the most inexperienced students. In a way, that can be completely detrimental to the students who are receiving instruction. Yet, in another sense, that situation provides an easier opportunity to be “co-investigators” as Freire proposed. I think so long as we are honest (at least to ourselves, if not also our students) that we can learn what we need to know in order to get through this, then it because much more like an exciting adventure than a box to check off.
As I see it, the situation could be a possible point for commiseration (of the best sort) between the students and the graduate-student-instructor. My first year composition courses as an undergrad were taught by graduate students and I loved that fact. I felt more enthusiastic about learning the materials than I did in other core courses taught by older professors. In many ways, I think it boiled down to the enthusiasm on their part and my knowledge that, in a way, we were all just learning together (even if they did have a few years of experience on me).