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1. Sitting in O'Hare Airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Minneapolis,
I was struck by the multiplicity of roles I have taken on. I am heading to
the TA conference for at least three professional reasons. As a scholar, I
am looking for research which compliments my own on how people learn to be
professors, as an instructional consultant who works both with TAs and
academic departments on preparation for and improvement of teaching, I am
looking for innovative ideas which I can bring back to my home campus. And
now, as a journalist with an assignment for WORKPLACE, I am looking at how
this gathering fits into the picture of academic labor.
2. A word of background before I discuss the 1997 conference. The first
National Conference on the Employment and Education of Graduate Teaching
Assistants was held in 1986 and focused on institutions' responsibilities
for the teaching of their TAs. While I wasn't there, the proceedings
suggest to me that this was a gathering of instructional support people,
talking about how they could persuade the public that the fact that classes
were taught by TAs rather than professors was not a failure by universities
and also what they could do for and to graduate students to help them be
"better" teachers.
3. By the second conference in 1989, some things had changed. The Pew
Charitable Trusts had taken an interest in these issues and funded
"Teaching Leadership Awards" to allow graduate students to attend the
conference. No longer was the focus on what could be done for or to TAs so
much as what TAs, faculty and support staff could do together. This meeting
and the next one in 1991 seem to have provided much of the impetus for the Preparing Future Faculty programs sponsored by
Pew and AAHE, programs which seek to address the many roles of faculty
which graduate education may or may not be addressing. Even so, much of the
attention was still on teacher "training."
4. I attended my first of these conferences in 1993. The theme of this meeting
was "Engaging the Disciplines," and representatives of many of the learned
societies including the MLA were in attendance. Many of the sessions
addressed the ways in which centralized instructional support units like
the Teaching Resources Center I work for could work in partnership with
academic departments to improve the support which TAs received for their
teaching.
5. In 1995, the conference was abuzz with reports on PFF; the universities
which had received Pew/AAHE grants were in their second year of the program
and had developed and were testing some interesting ideas. Most focused on
broadening the definition of graduate education, on offering more than a
piecemeal approach to preparation for the multiple roles of faculty:
scholarship, teaching, and collegiality and service.
6. Also, these PFF programs try to address one of the fundamental difficulties
of our system of graduate education as a preparation for the professoriate.
That is: all graduate education in North America happens in fewer than 300
research universities, but most of those new PhDs who are lucky enough to
find academic employment are hired by the more than 3300 colleges and
universities which do not offer doctoral studies, whose missions and
cultures are often quite different. The PFF programs seek to bridge this
gap by forming partnerships between the doctoral institutions and other
colleges and universities in their neighborhoods, placing some graduate
students in these institutions for a semester or two to learn about what
faculty life in such a place is like. These programs also regularly bring
faculty from the partner institutions to the research campus to meet with
graduate students.
7. Reports on these programs featured presentations by faculty from the
research universities and the partner schools, but most persuasive were the
testimonials of the graduate students who had participated. The programs
are not available at all graduate schools, nor even to all students at the
universities which sponsor such programs, but they seem to make a huge
difference in the confidence and professional expectations of the students
who do participate.
8. This year, the sixth conference in the series was advertised as focusing on
"Changing Graduate Education." Quite a tall order.
9. In keeping with this theme, the consensus of opinion at the conference
seemed to be that in the ten years since the first meeting of this group,
there has been a great deal of improvement in the programmatic support of
graduate students in developing teaching skills, at least at the
institutions represented at the conference. Nobody was reporting still the
kind of "throw 'em in the deep end" situation which I experienced as a new
TA in 1982, discovering that I would teach my own class only two weeks
before the term began and receiving a copy of last year's syllabus as my
only guide for what to do.
10. Instead, while the focus of many sessions at this conference was still on
reports of teaching support programs, many others shifted their attention
to preparation for professional roles other than teaching: mentoring, the
job search, and awareness of the differing institutional culture of
non-research universities were three that I attended.
11. Also of special interest to me were reports on two research projects on the
enculturation of future or new faculty, studies which parallel my own work.
One project, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and carried out by Jo
Sprague at San Jose State and Jody Nyquist, Don Wulff and Laura Manning of
the University of Washington, is a qualitative, longitudinal study on
graduate students' experiences across the years of their graduate study.
This study is about half way through its four year program of interviews,
but some themes are already emerging:
TA preparation is embedded in a larger context,
Factors which affect progress toward professional goals include
departmental and life responsibilities,
both formal and informal professional development activities,
and feedback.
Change is not linear nor do individuals experience it in the same way.
Professional preparation is neither systematic nor consistent.
Opportunities for reflection are important, yet the interviews for this
study were often the only such opportunity mentioned.
12. The other study, by Linda Worley and Christy Halbert of the University of
Kentucky, conducted surveys of two groups: faculty and administrators from
30 post-secondary institutions were asked what they want from newly hired
faculty and newly hired faculty at UK were asked to rank the relative
importance of many aspects of their careers and the preparation they
received in graduate school. Hiring institutions seem to value an interest
in and experience with general education more than specialist knowledge,
collegiality and team spirit.
13. The recent PhDs were asked to rank items three ways: as personally
important, as important to their career advancement, and how well their
graduate experience prepared them to meet these demands. As I expected from
my own research, publishing was the number one careers issue, followed
closely by conducting research and professional presentations. Graduate
school prepared them well for these activities, although publishing came in
third rather than first in their preparation. However, their personal
values differ; assessing students fairly, teaching well, and developing a
personal teaching style top this list and publishing falls to number eight.
We have all experienced gaps between "who we are and what we do to survive"
as Jackson Browne put it ("The Pretender," 1977), but Worley and Halbert
have begun to quantify the differences for academics.
14. The plenary speakers also reflected the broader focus on graduate
education. Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs
and Dean of the Graduate Division at UCLA kicked off the conference Friday
morning. An anthropologist by training, Professor Mitchell-Kernan looked at
the socio-cultural system of higher education in a talk entitled
"Disciplinary Culture and Graduate Education: Opportunity or Obstacle?" She
pointed out that socialization of new members of any culture is a
collective responsibility: "It takes a village." In the village of academe,
this socialization is complicated by the complex geographic and
trans-geographic structure of the profession, the slippery boundaries of
disciplinary identities, the specialized missions of institutions, and the
personal and political chemistry of various departments.
15. Mitchell-Kernan suggested that our conception of the teaching assistantship
needs to revised in order to promote ethics and responsibility in both
research and teaching, to make explicit the informal socialization which
many faculty assume will occur but often doesn't, and to provide mentoring
on a broader and more flexible set of professional issues. She said that
making these changes is the responsibility of individual faculty and
departments, but that urging the changes and creating an environment
supportive of such change is the responsibility of graduate school
administrations. This sounds somewhat like the PFF idea. But exactly how we
will negotiate this cultural shift from a system of graduate focused mostly
on research to one which honors and supports teaching and other
professional activities, however, was not entirely clear.
16. Friday afternoon, Donald Kennedy, former US Food and Drug Commissioner and
ex-President of Stanford, spoke on "The PhD Octopus Revisited: New
Challenges to Doctoral Education." Beginning with his own teaching
autobiography, Kennedy reviewed the history of higher education since the
ascendancy of the doctoral degree as the necessary credential for
university faculty which William James characterized as "an octopus" in
1903. The problem Kennedy identified is the one mentioned above as central
to the PFF movement: all graduate education in North America happens in
a research culture, but
most new PhDs lucky enough to find academic employment are hired
by colleges and universities that do not offer doctoral
studies, whose missions and cultures are often teaching centered. He called
this a "dysfunctional misalignment."
17. After reviewing the history and economics of the growth of PhD programs
first to meet and then to exceed the needs of American higher education
since 1945, Kennedy concluded that what he saw as "the overproduction of PhDs" is the result
of a fundamental conflict of interest: as graduate students provide support
for faculty research, both by serving as research assistants and by
enrolling in specialized seminars, the very people who would have to agree
to cut graduate enrollments have a vested interest in keeping them high (and are thus complicit in the underproduction of jobs).
18. In addition to praising the Pew/AAHE PFF initiative, Kennedy suggested
reducing time-to-degree by requiring a shorter dissertation. In order to
raise the value of teaching to parallel that of research, he would require
the thesis be understandable to an educated layperson and to explicitly
deal with the implications the reported research has for the teaching of
the discipline. He also proposed that universities invite teams of senior
TAs from several programs to design and teach interdisciplinary,
upper-division courses in order to gain experience with course design,
cross-disciplinary communication, and teaching a different student
population. Kennedy finished his talk by praising those present, saying
that over the past ten years, teaching and TA programs were the part of
graduate education which had actually made improvements. He challenged the
rest of graduate education to do as well.
19. The third plenary speaker was Jules LaPidus of the Council of Graduate
Schools. Very soon after this conference, LaPidus published a "Point of
View" essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education which took a tone which
could easily be read as blaming the victim, graduate students, for the
so-called "overproduction of PhDs." I won't take up the argument against this piece
here; I simply mention it to say that when speaking to an audience of TAs
and their advocates, he did not take that tone at all. Taking his title
from a quotation found in the 1958 Italian novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di
Lampedusa, The Leopard, LaPidus claimed that "If we want things to stay as
they are, things will have to change." That is to say, if the nature of
higher education and the role of the university in our society is to stay
the same as it has been, the relationships between faculty, graduate
students and administrators and the institutions of higher education will
have to change. He spoke of the changes "forced upon us" by technology,
distance education, and the challenge of such institutions as the
University of Phoenix to the traditional, place-bound concept of education.
He claimed that he did not believe that new technology would mean the end
of faculty careers, but he did imply that the shape of such careers will
likely be different than in the past.
19. LaPidus claimed that while the current model of graduate education is good at
preparing researchers, it does not help them look at their work within the
bigger picture of scholarship, nor does it prepare them very well for the
transition to a career, either as faculty or in industry (noting that close to half of all PhDs have always gone to industry rather
than higher education, ignoring disciplinary differences). He said that to remain relevant, graduate education
change from the master/apprentice metaphor to one of intellectual
collegiality; not only to prepare
future faculty, but also future industrial researchers.
20. His tone was not
accusatory, but his message was not hopeful. (For the full text of a version of this
paper, see www.cgs.org).
21. As has been my experience at all three of these National GTA Conferences,
the participants and presenters were far ahead of the big-name speakers on
most of the issues facing graduate students as teachers and as people
preparing for a professional career. The National Consortium on Preparing
Graduate Students as College Teachers once again did an excellent job of
bringing together its several constituencies-teaching support
professionals, faculty committed to TA development, and activist graduate
students-to share information and to build interest and energy for the
continuation of efforts to assist TAs in performing the duties asked of
them as graduate employees and also to change graduate school from simply a
system of research training and credentialing into a broad-based
preparation for many of the aspects of a faculty life, especially but not
only, teaching.
The conference was sponsored by:
National Consortium on Preparing Graduate Students as College Teachers
American Association for Higher Education
Association of American Colleges and Universities
Council of Graduate Schools
Professional Organizational Development Network in Higher Education
NAGPS
International Teaching Assistant Interest Section of TESOL
International Alliance of Teacher/Scholars
And hosted by
The Center for Teaching and Learning Services and
The Graduate School, University of Minnesota
Alan Kalish, Indiana University
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by Alan Kalish
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