To Cope or Not to Cope? Characterizing Biology Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) Coping with Teaching and Research Anxieties

Biology graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) often used adaptive coping strategies to manage teaching and research anxieties. Notably, GTAs tended to use strategies such as support seeking, self-reliance, accommodation, and distraction more often to manage research anxieties compared with teaching anxieties. Over time, GTAs narrowed their adaptive coping to certain strategies.

PSII-B-20 Benefits of a lecture teaching assistant in hiflex courses

The Covid-19 pandemic has required implantation of online education strategies, even for animal science courses, that are traditionally delivered face-to-face (F2F). As universities reopened many students were given the option of attending classes either F2F or remotely via live stream. This scenario, where some students are present in-person while others are present online simultaneously, is referred to as hiflex teaching. Face-to-face and online teaching strategies are established and literature contains pedagogical information, however hiflex teaching presents previously unencountered challenges. It can be difficult for instructors to maintain engagement with, essentially, two separative audiences of students. The objective was to address this issue by providing a graduate teaching assistant (TA) to large lecture courses, where traditionally TA positions were reserved only for lab courses. The hypothesis was that this would enable both audiences to receive appropriate focus. In this study, a TA attended the F2F lecture for an introductory equine science course (total students: n = 75; remote students: n= ~55), with the role of monitoring the simultaneous Zoom session with remote students. We found that questions from remote students increased when they had the ability to post them in real-time using the Zoom chat feature, as opposed waiting for a break in instruction in F2F situations. Having the TA present in the classroom enabled them to answer basic questions via Zoom, and to interact with the instructor should a question arise online that would benefit all students in the course. This allowed the instructor to effectively teach without taking up valuable class time alternating between programs on the computer and risking missing an online student question. This approach received positive feedback from the instructor and students alike. Additionally, it provided a novel teaching experience for a graduate TA. Similar strategies may be used to help to facilitate future success in hiflex courses.

Self-Study: Tensions and Growth in Graduate Teaching Assistant Development

Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) development is an important undertaking for many higher education institutions in the United States. During the GTA preparation process, tensions can arise when the supervisor challenges GTAs by engaging in critical reflection and pushing them to advance their pedagogical skills beyond their comfort zone. Guided by Berry’s (2008) framework of tensions, this self-study aimed to answer the research question: How do tensions that arise during GTA development contribute to the professional growth of teacher educators and GTAs in their teaching? Self-study was the research method, and the data were analyzed using the strategy of inductive analysis and creative synthesis (Patten, 2002). This self-study reports five types of tensions: telling and growth; confidence and uncertainty; safety and challenge; valuing and reconstructing experience; and planning and being responsive. The findings explain how these tensions pushed the supervisor and the GTA to reflect on teacher preparation, manage challenges, and improve teaching. While tensions place teacher educators and novice teachers in uncomfortable positions, this study shows that reflections on and articulation of tensions in collaborative dialogues can help both discover aspects of their teaching that provide opportunities for growth and lead both to transform tensions into teachable moments.

Teaching Ethnography/ically: Entanglements of Knowing/Being/Doing in a Doctoral Research Course

Since the 1970s and 1980s numerous books and articles on the processes and procedures of qualitative research are published each year, ranging from accounts of different traditions, methodologies, and methods to comprehensive treatments of single approaches or specialized research practices. A small corpus of literature exists on the teaching of qualitative inquiry with the teaching of ethnography rarely considered. The primary focus in these research literatures on methodology and how to do research promotes a divide between epistemology and methodology (Eisenhart & Jurow, 2011). Drawing on feminist poststructuralist and posthumanist theoretical tools this article examines the pedagogical practices and the entanglements they produce in a research course on ethnography in education for doctoral students. Through collective memory work among five faculty members and one graduate teaching assistant, we offer a historical overview and design of the yearlong course within a doctoral program in language, literacy, and culture and, through writing and diffractive reading as analysis, offer commentary on the entanglements of hanging out and hanging loose, going through thick and thin, and disturbing knowledge/power dynamics. This collective remembering and analytical work demonstrates that students’ understanding of ethnographic research as epistemological-methodological-ontological practice as the entanglements produce new knowing/doing/being.

Developing a Model of Graduate Teaching Assistant Teacher Efficacy: How Do High and Low Teacher Efficacy Teaching Assistants Compare?

This study identifies factors that influence the development of teacher efficacy in STEM graduate teaching assistants over the course of one semester. Those with high teacher efficacy draw upon mastery experience, vicarious experience, and verbal and social persuasions from reliable sources, such as professors and accomplished peers.

Impact of the Lead TA Program on the Perceived Disciplinary Instructional Competence of Graduate Teaching Assistants

Graduate teaching assistant (GTA) training initiatives such as the Lead TA Program seek to enhance the instructional competence of GTAs at a disciplinary level. This paper outlines the results of a mixed-method study conducted to evaluate the perceived impact of the Lead TA Program on GTAs during a two-year pilot implementation stage at a large, research-intensive Canadian university. As a result of participating in programming offered by Lead TAs, GTAs reported overall gains in their confidence as an instructor as well as increased disciplinary instructional competence. GTAs’ perceived benefits in relation to disciplinary instructional competence included: (a) increased knowledge of the TA role in the context of their department, (b) gains in pedagogical content knowledge, and (c) increased classroom management skills when facilitating disciplinary tasks or discussions. The study points to the potential for the Lead TA Program to enhance the general, domain, and topic-specific pedagogical content knowledge of GTAs. Unique challenges of implementing discipline-specific programming are addressed and recommendations are offered for establishing similar programs at other universities.