[ATTW-L] Grad teaching assistants and tech comm service courses

[Bay, Jennifer L]

Hi Abigail,

Purdue’s TA training is very similar to Penn State’s—a year-long practicum for first-year writing, then a semester long practicum focused on teaching our service course in business writing. Although we do not have official practica for teaching online or technical writing, we have been offering an online teaching “boot-camp” for our instructors in May before they teach online (almost all of our summer offerings are online), as well as informal training for teaching technical writing. We have a strong secondary area for our PhD students in Professional and Technical Writing, so they are also supported by that advanced coursework.

TAs can customize their courses as they progress through the program as long as they meet course outcomes, and we also maintain an internal, crowd-sourced repository of syllabi, assignments and class activities.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Jenny

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Dr. Jennifer Bay
Associate Professor of English
Director of Professional Writing
Purdue University
jbay at purdue.edu<https://owa.purdue.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=KgY9tnDwgUmpUmW_dbtCb2KPbixdtNAIjcoCqlcuYj4Ai593qjE7F8Dapm8YpuPDGNQJ1JiULvw.&URL=mailto%3ajbay%40purdue.edu>
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From: ATTW-L <attw-l-bounces at attw.org> on behalf of Stuart Selber <selber at psu.edu>
Date: Thursday, April 9, 2020 at 9:02 AM
To: "Bakke, Abigail R" <abigail.bakke at mnsu.edu>
Cc: "attw-l at attw.org" <attw-l at attw.org>
Subject: Re: [ATTW-L] Grad teaching assistants and tech comm service courses

Hi Abigail--

All of the graduate students at Penn State begin by teaching first-year composition, and with that comes a two-semester teaching practicum.

After they have completed this requirement they can then teach our service course in technical communication, which comes with a one-semeter teaching practicum. If they want to also teach business writing they take a practicum for that course too. The practicum meets weekly, and the students use a common syllabus, assignments, etc. They can customize their own version of the service course down the road.

We also have a practicum for online teaching.

Our students have 3-4 semesters of teacher training (or more) before they hit the job market.

Stuart

Stuart A. Selber
Associate Professor of English
Director of Digital Education
Director of The Penn State Digital English Studio
Department of English
Penn State University
University Park, PA 16802

selber at psu.edu<mailto:selber at psu.edu>
http://sites.psu.edu/selber
http://www.des.psu.edu
814-863-8032
814-863-7285 (fax)


On Apr 8, 2020, at 1:09 PM, Bakke, Abigail R <abigail.bakke at mnsu.edu<mailto:abigail.bakke at mnsu.edu>> wrote:

Hi all,

I'm working on a proposal for training tech comm grad students to teach our tech comm service courses. As part of that process, I want to get a sense of how other programs handle this.

If your program offers TAships to tech comm master's and/or PhD students, what are the qualifications or requirements for those grad students to teach tech comm? For instance, must they teach first-year comp first?

What about teaching online - what additional qualifications/requirements are in place for TAs to teach courses online?

Thanks for your help.

Abi

Abigail Bakke, PhD

Assistant Professor, Technical Communication
Department of English
Minnesota State University, Mankato
Armstrong 307H
(507) 389-1035
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