Reconsidering Graduate Students’ Education as Teachers: “It Takes a Department!”

Abstract

The article argues that prevailing approaches to educating graduate students as teachers need to be broadened conceptually and in practice. In particular, it suggests that preparing graduate students to teach constitutes only one component of a two-fold responsibility of graduate programs: to educate their students both as researchers and as teachers. To establish this linkage, graduate departments require a comprehensive intellectual-academic center that touches upon all practices of its members, faculty, and graduate students, in research and teaching. The paper suggests that a carefully conceptualized, integrated 4-year, content-oriented and task-based curriculum with a literacy focus provides such an intellectual core. By overcoming the traditional split of language and content, it invites a reconsideration of current practices in teaching and in the relationship of teaching and research. The article elaborates these issues through a case study in one graduate department, focusing on the implications of a reconfigured departmental culture for graduate students' education as teachers and for their socialization into the profession. It concludes with observations about the nature and conditions of change in higher education.AS LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING in collegiate foreign language (FL) departments have become more professionalized, the preparation of graduate teaching assistants (TAs), too, has followed this path. It has done so by emphasizing language acquisition theory and research, the pedagogical consequences brought on by communicative language teaching, and program planning, administration, and assessment, as well as by carefully supervising students as they perform diverse instructional or programmatic tasks.Great strides have been made as a result of these changes. However, further advances run up against two inherent limitations. First, they confront the reality of academically and structurally bifurcated FL departments divided into a "language" and a "content" portion. Second, because of this split, supervisors, coordinators, and directors of FL programs who are responsible for improving the preparation of graduate TAs for teaching cannot pursue the range of possibilities that best practice in adult FL pedagogy and in the education of future teachers suggests, nor can they generally affect language-learning goals and pedagogies in non-language classes, even though language learning is expected to take place in that environment.These structural and positional realities highlight a deep indecision within the profession over the relationship between knowledge and language and, by extension, the nature of language learning. On the one hand, both traditional literature and cultural studies departments assert an intimate, even symbiotic relationship between knowledge or culture and language. Indeed, FL departments are defined by the fact that their students are, in complex ways, simultaneously knowledge acquirers and language learners, in the first language (L1) and the second language (L2). On the o...

Saying vs. Doing: A Contradiction in the Professional Development of Foreign Language Teaching Assistants

“…More important, TAs seemed to be unaware of the various domains in which they would be required to demonstrate their knowledge and skills, as well as the impact of their attitudes toward and awareness of the varying emphases on teaching, research, and service that characterize the K–12 or postsecondary institutions in which they preferred to seek employment. Key decision makers, including TAs, need to come together to modify TAs’ awareness of and attitudes toward professional development as well as the range and intensity of professional development opportunities to ensure that graduate programs meet their responsibility “to educate their students both as researchers and as teachers” (Byrnes, , p. 512; emphasis added) and truly prepare them for their future roles.…”

An Ecological View of Whole‐Class Discussions in a Second Language Literature Classroom: Teacher Reformulations as Affordances for Learning

“…While it makes sense to expect teaching experience to hone that ability over time, there is also much reason to believe that the necessary meta‐awareness does not come about automatically. For the language studies profession, particularly graduate programs that educate the future professoriate, how they hope to meet that challenge is a question that first needs to be posed in a forthright manner before it can be answered through programmatic responses (see the discussion in Byrnes, ). This study has offered a first glimpse into how this challenge might be met theoretically, how it might be met through empirical study, and how it might begin to be translated into the education of future teachers who are the choreographers of classroom discourse.…”

Embracing the Language‐Educational Challenge of FL Departments: Reflections on Ways Forward

“…While initiating such changes may seem daunting, the following tactics proved useful in implementing a successful curricular reform in our home department, the German Department at Georgetown University (cf. Byrnes, ): Consider curriculum development as development of faculty expertise and a deeply intellectual form of engagement that links teaching, scholarship, and service; Connect curriculum development to research and publications for tenure and promotion; Collaborate, because the involvement of various players (faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, administration) is key for addressing all facets of the work of FL programs; Keep the administration informed; Find ways to reward the work being done on the project and celebrate community; See change as ongoing through engagement in the assessment, curriculum, and pedagogic transformation cycle. …”