Here Today, Not Gone Tomorrow

Toni A.H. McNaron
Professor of English
University of Minnesota

Today's graduate students demand far more of us than I did of my professors thirty-five years ago. In the early 60s, all I expected was to be taught material about the field I had chosen and to get a letter of recommendation at the end of the process. Furthermore, getting a job had virtually nothing to do with teaching abilities or with evidence of professional engagement. Now we ask incoming students already to know what their dissertations are to be about and what their career goals are. Everything has been pushed back--I think it begins when schools elect kings and queens of kindergarten classes or when fifth graders are already studying for placement tests into the "right" middle schools. The result is a group of graduate students who look to their professors for all sorts of leadership and guidance and who expect to be treated in all sorts of new ways.

Our Charges? Chattel?

One of the best examples of this change has to do with expectations graduate teaching assistants have of what that experience will be like. They want to be seen as moving an important step closer to becoming autonomous classroom teachers just when many faculty view having them as a release from some of the most time-consuming aspects of teaching. Such faculty value that release because their institutions reward them primarily for published scholarship, research, or creative productions, not for how well they read sophomore papers and exams, or how clearly they set up laboratory experiments or language lab exercises.

Reworking an old saw into "Here today, not gone tomorrow" catches the essence of what we must change about graduate education if we are to meet students' expectations. Too many faculty still think in terms of "our" graduate students with whom we can do as we see fit. We offer them employment at subsistence levels, while we tell them they must complete their studies and dissertation in a fixed number of years. Many of us have no idea what can be afforded with the salaries we pay teaching and research assistants. Many of us have no idea what those salaries are. The most usual criterion for assigning a given graduate student to an assistantship is departmental need rather than student knowledge base or intellectual interest. Once assigned, TAs are most often asked to do unpleasant and time-consuming aspects of the work. While a few conscientious faculty hold regular sessions with graduate assistants to discuss how

a course or lab is going, far too many heave a sigh of relief at not having to attend to pedestrian aspects of the course, and promptly move on to research.

We tend to employ graduate students for as long as possible without offering them a progression of learning skills in a variety of teaching situations. Quite the contrary: we often value having TAs who are "experienced" at what we want done: never mind how inexperienced they may be at carrying out the array of pedagogical practices that will be demanded of them once they assume a full-time position.

Why do we do this? In part because we cling to the myopic vision of their being "our" graduate students rather than seeing them as someone's future faculty members. We sacrifice their growth in order to have smooth-running courses on our campus. In order to stop this selfish behavior we must alter our own perception of what it is we are part of.

Finding a "We"

Only if we faculty see what we do as part of a huge picture called higher education can we relinquish what feels helpful in the day-to-day struggle to juggle our academic and personal lives. The women and men who take our graduate seminars and assist in our courses are integrally connected to us no matter where they go to teach or practice law, medicine, architecture or the like. The greater good of the academic profession depends in no small measure on how fast and effectively we faculty can look "beyond our own noses."

I'm reminded of the wonderful book Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, the famous Southern 20th century novelist. This story of a young girl's coming of age in the 40s involves Frankie's finding a "we" to which she can attach her "me." Without this community, she will continue to flounder as a misfit, causing herself and others trouble and pain. Our graduate students are very like Frankie Adams: they are at a crucial stage in their professional development where they need to find the best "we" available. By signing up for graduate study, they may think they have chosen a community--professors who share their own love for and commitment to a particular field and to the teaching of that field to future generations.

How can those of us established in the academy guide them out of their isolated "me's" into the "we" they want to join? I offer the following specific suggestions for rethinking graduate training programs.

Four Suggested Reforms

1. When admitting students, we could posit new questions. In addition to asking where their studies are headed, we could ask them to name and analyze the best and worst learning situation they experienced in undergraduate school. We could ask them their preferred learning style(s), and to describe an instance in which one of their teachers taught to that style. We could ask them what they believe to be the ethics of the profession they say they want to enter.

2. Once a person becomes a graduate student in our department, we could plan a coherent, progressive program for their intellectual growth and learning and for their professional growth and learning. In their first year, all students could be placed into a seminar focusing on departmental and campus culture, and moving to an historical and current view of the discipline or profession. This group experience would be augmented by an individual experience in which each was assigned to "shadow" a veteran professor in the department for a specified period. By changing the pairings at regular intervals, each student would come to the end of his or her first year with several examples of how to "be" whatever it is he or she wants to be.

3. In the second year, the student would assist in an undergraduate course, but with a huge difference from what often is the case presently. The professor in charge would meet weekly with all TAs for a given course and conduct an informal seminar on pedagogical matters--choosing appropriate texts, designing challenging and divergent assignments, creating appropriate assessment instruments. Simultaneously, the department would fund the students' participation in campus-wide, credit-bearing workshops in which results of cross-disciplinary educational research would be introduced, demonstrated, and adapted to individual students' fields.

   Once a graduate student had assisted in two undergraduate courses, he or she would be promoted to co-teach a course with a professor. In such a program, the student would do some lecturing, assignment formation, independent but supervised grading, all supervised by the professor. Conferences with the professor would be a regular component of such an experience.

4. As a next step, each advanced graduate student would teach an autonomous course. But he or she would not simply be assigned a course with a room number. A professor with experience teaching the course in question would hold discussions with the graduate student before the course began and at mid-term to see how things are going. The professor would visit the class at the beginning and near the end of the term, offering advice based on direct observation. At the end of the course, a final discussion would take place in which the experienced professor would help the novice begin thinking about what to include in a teaching portfolio that will be developed over the next 30 years or more.

A Cost-Benefit Analysis

If you're thinking my scheme involves a lot of teaching of undergraduates by graduate students at a time when the public often expresses concern about their sons and daughters not being taught by full professors, let me try to allay your uneasiness. For two very good reasons, such teaching arrangements benefit undergraduates. First, it is our near Ph.D.'s who are working at the very edges of knowledge production in their fields. What they have to tell undergraduates may be of immediate and long-term value. The other reason has to do with reaching undergraduates. I recently taught freshman composition for the first time in thirty-five years. I found it almost impossible to establish any common ground with the students. When I asked for spontaneous thesis sentences, they cited people and events totally unfamiliar to me, while my examples seemed to have been plucked from ancient history. While teaching my section, I was also mentoring three new graduate students teaching the same course. When I visited one of my mentees, I found her students talking animatedly and freely with her. As I analyzed that experience, I recalled her bandying with them about rock groups or MTV programs, not because she enjoys such things but simply because she knows what they are. They are part of the world she inhabits. I'm sure her students were learning about semi-colons and substantive paragraphs in part because their teacher was closer to their own culture.

When we hear complaints or worries from parents and others about our institutions' increasing reliance on graduate students for instruction, we can respond without apology. To do that, however, will involve radical change in our own attitudes toward the use of so-called TAs in our classrooms. Perhaps we need a new acronym--if we called such people FFs--future faculty--would it alter how we and others thought of them? Having a TA means I have someone to assist me in doing what I am supposed to do. There is no implicit commitment for me to assist that person in becoming tomorrow's great professor. If I was told I was being assigned a "future faculty member," I might be willing to spend time discussing the enterprise we both have committed ourselves to fostering.

My design is founded on a step-by-step process of empowerment of graduate students--as thinkers most certainly, but also and importantly as teachers of other thinkers and as members of my profession. If I "use" graduate students at my institution for my own and my department's benefit, I disempower them in significant ways. What I've proposed is not expensive in dollars. The "cost" entails a sea change in how faculty in charge of graduate education and employment think about the men and women we admit.

Contact:
Professor Toni A.H. McNaron
Department of English
University of Minnesota
207 Lind Hall
207 Church St. SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Telephone: (612) 625-6880
Fax: (612) 624-8228
E-Mail: mcnar001@maroon.tc.umn.edu