Dynamic Reflective Practices for Graduate Teaching Assistants in Composition: Pathways to Professional Development
Emily R C Staudt
Advisor: E Shelley Reid, PhD, Department of English
Committee Members: Courtney Adams Wooten, Jennifer Johnson
Horizon Hall, #4225, https://gmu.zoom.us/j/95507738819
September 24, 2024, 02:00 PM to 04:00 PM
Abstract:
Scholars in Composition, Writing Studies, and Education have thoughtfully described and theorized about graduate teaching assistant (TA) preparation. Scholars generally agree that reflection is an important part of TAs’ preparation, and reflection is often incorporated into their practicum. We have a sense of some of the influences upon TAs’ identities, teaching, and growth, yet we’re lacking clear data on the effects of reflection upon TA development, and the ways reflection-as-professional development (PD) can best be designed to foster TA growth and surface the complex influence of identities and experiences upon that growth.
The aim of this study is to investigate the responses of graduate TAs in Composition as they encounter repeated, directed reflective interviews. In particular, this study explores how reflective practice can show the growth, influences, and dynamism in TAs’ teaching identities, reflections, and pedagogy. Beyond that, this study investigates how programs can offer PD that encourages instructors’ growth, specifically in relation to PhD GTAs teaching in the research site’s Composition program. The impetus for such a study is the acknowledgement that continual growth and reflection is the mark of a professional, yet this growth is complicated by the myriad of identities and experiences that influence even new teachers’ approaches to teaching. Further, the career cycle of instructors includes times of growth, stagnation, and lack of growth due to responsibilities and concerns elsewhere—it’s often not a linear progression.
This study offered TAs a chance to be co-researchers so that not only were their voices amplified, but they were able to benefit from participating in this research. The six participants in this study give us a sense of the diversity TAs bring to the Composition program in race, age, gender, teaching experience, work experience, student experience, career goals, research interests, family members, pedagogy, identities, faith, learning disabilities, and more. This project focuses on an analysis of TAs’ reflections in four interviews conducted over two semesters, each of which included interview questions that prompted participants with furthering, recursive-reflection, document-based, and ecology-based reflection questions. In the analysis of these reflections, a revised version of Barbara Larrivee’s reflection model is proposed to appreciate the dynamism and growth present in TAs’ reflections, pedagogies, and teaching identities.
WPAs and other professional developers (PDs) can improve their PD offerings by prompting reflection-as-PD like that offered in this study: repeated, recursive, furthered, grounded, and contextualized reflections. By pairing reflection-as-PD with the revised reflection heuristic, WPAs, PDs, and TAs can better understand the complex and interconnected experiences and identities that affect TAs’ teaching identities, reflections, and pedagogies and appreciate the growth and dynamism of TAs’ reflective practices and teaching identities.