Navigating the landscape of pedagogical training: The journeys of three mathematics graduate students

Abstract

This article describes the landscape of teaching assistantships (TAships) in the Mathematics Department of a large, public, research institution. First, we present visualized data describing the terrain for all mathematics graduate students. Second, we focus on three specific journeys in that terrain. We employ an autoethnographical research methodology to analyze the pedagogical paths of three recent graduates through written reflection. We highlight some surprising themes that emerge, identify key moments in each reflection, and make three proposals, applicable in broader contexts, to capture and confer their benefits.
 
 Dans notre article, nous traçons le portrait de l’assistanat d’enseignement dans le département de Mathématique d’un grand établissement public de recherche. Tout d’abord, nous présentons des données sous forme visuelle de manière à décrire la réalité sur le terrain des étudiants en mathématique des cycles supérieurs. Ensuite, nous portons notre attention sur trois parcours particuliers. Au moyen de réflexions menées par écrit, nous utilisons une méthodologie de recherche autoethnographique afin d’analyser le parcours pédagogique de trois nouveaux diplômés. Nous soulignons certains thèmes surprenants, nous dégageons les moments clés de chaque réflexion, puis nous énonçons trois propositions – lesquelles peuvent être utilisées dans un contexte plus large – et nous en présentons les avantages.

“A Group of People to Lean On and Learn From”: Graduate Teaching Assistant Experiences in a Pedagogy-Focused Community of Practice

“…CoPs in higher education most frequently feature faculty as community members (e.g., Aster, Bouwma-Gearhart, and Fisher 2021;Embrett et al 2021;Nadelson 2016;Weinberg, Balgopal, and Sample McMeeking 2021), or pre-service teacher communities (e.g., Chaplin and Munn 2020;Hou 2015). We found one study exploring experiences of international GTAs' socialization and teaching selfefficacy through a CoP (Hakkola, Chien, and Pelletreau 2020), one describing the influence and importance of finding support in a community for three math GTAs (Coles et al 2020), and another with GTAs forming their own teaching forum, akin to a CoP (Milner-Bolotin 2001). However, we found no studies describing a CoP with STEM lab GTAs and faculty members as a site for pedagogical learning and support, therefore, we created a semester-long, pedagogy-focused CoP to support exercise physiology (ex-phys) lab GTAs' teaching and pedagogical learning, within our university context.…”

“…For some, completing a teaching assistantship (TAship) may be a requirement of their graduate program (The Princeton Review, n.d.); for others TAships provide income, teaching opportunities, and serve as an entry point to an academic career (Nasser-Abu Alhija and Fresko 2020). While not all graduate students should (or desire to) teach, and some GTAs play a marking-only role (e.g., Coles et al 2020), those who do teach can make a lasting impact on their students' learning and experience (Basey, Maines, and Francis 2014;Lee 2019;Roden et al 2018;Wan et al 2020). GTAs' pedagogical development is an important Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) topic because of the central role they play in teaching and learning in higher education, which affords GTAs the opportunity to influence the educational cultures they contribute to not only during graduate school but throughout their careers (Wyse, Long, and Ebert-May 2014).…”