Pedagogy & Professional

Dana Gavin (Old Dominion University)

Kristin Lacey (Boston University)

Graduate students often receive little -- if any -- formal instruction on classroom praxis, from developing syllabi to student management techniques. Students who have teaching fellowships, early career scholars, and contingent educators may devote a great deal of time to independently developing teaching strategies, basing their ideas on their own experiences as students and through informal networking and information sharing. Graduate students and CAITY educators may also encounter departmental expectations (be they required assignments or texts) that constrain them pedagogically, while offering no clear instruction for personalizing those classes, so both the educator and their students may thrive. Within this unclear framework, graduate students struggle to complete their degrees, while adjunct and contingent educators are trying to incorporate time to research and publish. This panel seeks papers that focus on teaching praxis that specifically takes into consideration contingent laborers’ unique needs.

This session is organized by the Graduate Student Caucus, but these concerns are shared by many. Graduate students often also serve as contingent faculty due to insufficient university funding, many contingent faculty teach at multiple institutions, and even tenure track faculty are thrust into graduate-level instruction with no explicit training. We eagerly invite scholars at any level of teaching experience to propose presentations.

Possible topics might address (but are not limited to) the following:

Developing the same or similar courses for multiple institutions
Personalizing a syllabus with institutional constraints
Creating work/life balance within a syllabus, for students and educator
Disrupting “traditional” teaching models
Best practices regarding feedback on student work
Managing a challenging classroom
Creating an accessible classroom
Creating a pedagogically-inclusive classroom
Pedagogical training for graduate students and early-career faculty
Teaching an upper-level or graduate-level course for the first time

Please submit proposals of 250-300 words, a biography of 100 words or fewer, and note how you would address one of the topics above or a similar topic.

Graduate students often also serve as contingent faculty due to insufficient university funding, many contingent faculty teach at multiple institutions, and even tenure-track faculty are thrust into graduate-level instruction with no explicit training. We eagerly invite scholars at any level of teaching experience to propose presentations on classroom praxis, from developing syllabi to student management techniques and beyond.