What Is Missing in the International Teaching Assistants Training Curriculum

Abstract

The increasing number of international teaching assistants (ITAs) in American undergraduate courses presents continued sociocultural, linguistic, and pedagogical challenges. Remaining underdeveloped, ITA training has attracted less attention in recent years. urge a renewed enthusiasm for developing effective training curriculum. review the focus of the ITA training curriculum over the past 30 years in terms of its content, implementation process, and context, and examine the missing elements that can make the training effective. incorporate theories of multicultural education and postmodernism, and situate the discussion in the framework of professional development. As a conceptual analysis, this paper focuses on the why of integrating the missing elements, rather than the how of improving the curriculum in concrete steps. You're the worst professor have ever met. mean it. shouldn't call you professor, TA! - One student feedback for an ITA in Chemistry Department, Binghamton University. I think am too nice with my students, not assertive enough. feel am jumped at by them. - One TA from China in Computer Science Department, Binghamton University. These comments, one about an international teaching assistant (IT A) and one by an ITA, indicate the continued complaints and confusions in American undergraduate courses taught by ITAs since their first large increase in the early 1980s (Kaufman & Brownworth, 2006). While enriching the undergraduate educational experiences, the increasing presence of ITAs has brought particular sociocultural, linguistic, and pedagogical challenges that have led to the development of a new field of research related to ITAs and a wide range of training programs. Over the years, the scope of the training curriculum has expanded from an exclusive focus on linguistic issues to a more comprehensive set of concerns, including linguistic, pedagogical, and cultural competences. Despite some major advances, the field of ITA training remains largely underdeveloped. As the number of ITAs continues to grow, so do the complaints and intolerance among American students. In a 2005 New York Times article (Finder, 2005), interviews with undergraduates at six universities revealed that the number of ITAs in a department strongly influences the major an American undergraduate decides to pursue. Gravois (2005) also reported American undergraduates' strong prejudice against ITAs, no matter if an ITA presents the information appropriately or not. However, remaining unresolved, the ITA issues and challenges have attracted less attention in recent years. No explanation has been found. Perhaps the presence of ITAs has become so common that we stop noticing, or since the 20-years effort has not seen much improvement of the problem, we just choose to live with it. But can we afford to do so? When we enlarge the enrollment and replace fulltime faculty by ITAs with little effective support, we have improved the access, but the question is the access to what? When we organize such activities as cultural festivals and cross-cultural workshops to enhance intercultural communication and to promote a multicultural and democratic learning environment, we are ignoring the classes taught by ITAs as the best place for nurturing authentic and meaningful cross-cultural dialogs. That said, the purpose of this paper is to: 1) examine the focus of ITA training curriculum over the past 30 years in terms of its content, implementation process, and context; and 2) discuss the missing elements that may make these programs effective. incorporate theories of multicultural education and postmodernism, and situate the analysis in the professional development framework. As a conceptual analysis, this paper focuses on the why of integrating the missing elements, rather than the how of improving the curriculum in concrete steps. What Is Missing in the Content of the ITA Training Curriculum? …

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