Earlier this month, the UC Academic Student Employees and the University of California agreed to a new contract for teaching assistants that included wage increases, family-friendly benefits, anti-discrimination provisions and workload protections.
And while the new contract makes it more possible and sustainable to be a TA, faculty and undergraduates shouldn’t expect the quality of TA instruction to improve without improving departmental hiring and appointment practices.
Specifically, departments could make use of end-of-quarter TA evaluations when making reappointments, something that, to the likely surprise of undergraduates, does not occur often.
Teaching assisting is a demanding job, and the new contract includes much-needed stipulations. As a unionized TA myself, I can vouch firsthand that the hourly workload for TA gigs is seldom as advertised, and “overtime” is not a part of the institutional vocabulary.
We’re the glue of the university, linking faculty and students while doing all the little things that undergraduates can’t do and that faculty are too busy to do themselves. And the UC gets our services on the cheap.
Some will interpret the new union contract as a reflection of our importance, if not responsibilities, on campus (minimally, the subsequent negotiations seem to indicate the weight of a statewide TA strike as a bargaining chip). But shouldn’t our key responsibility entail giving undergraduates the best pedagogy possible?
In other words, your bad TA isn’t going to get any better. The union agreement was a substantive policy, with very little procedural weight or impact, and UCLA should be interested in addressing these shortcomings.
According to José Luis Santos, an assistant professor of higher education and organizational change, “(undergraduate education) generates lots of revenue. … Universities and departments have sought to maximize these dollars by minimizing costs (and finding) cheaper labor ““ TAs, part-time adjunct faculty and the like.”
We’ve all had good and bad professors. At large research universities like ours, faculty are often brought in because of seminal works they’ve published or groundbreaking research in their fields, not necessarily because they’re good in the classroom.
Graduate students aren’t much different. You can go to BruinWalk.com, and maybe see what you’re getting into before registering for classes, but there’s no predicting what graduate student will be appointed to your discussion group or be grading your papers. And neither BruinWalk nor ratemyprofessors.com ranks TA performance.
One problematic example is the STEM (science, technology, mathematics and engineering) courses at the University of Arizona, where TAs (mostly international graduate students) were found to do a majority of the teaching. Students complained about not having any contact with professors and not being able to understand their TAs.
At UCLA, there are some measures in place to ensure the best teaching assistants are placed in the classroom and trained properly, but these are not fail-proof, and procedures vary from department to department.
In terms of training, the UCLA Office of Instructional Development hosts an annual TA conference on campus aimed at helping new and experienced TAs improve their teaching skills, with special workshops for international graduate students. However, these workshops are not mandatory in all departments and the conference lasts a mere day.
What’s confounding this issue of TA placement and ensuring that good TAs are rehired is the variance of hiring and reappointment practices from department to department, and the under-utilization of end-of-quarter performance evaluations.
For example, faculty are almost exclusively responsible for TA appointments within the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. The department of political science, on the other hand, uses a ranking order established by a combination of variables, including published works, GPA and degree progress.
It deserves to be noted that post-quarter performance evaluations are rarely used by departments or faculty to assess suitability for TA reappointment.
One exception to this is the Department of Electrical Engineering, where evaluations are part of a competitive application process that includes a test of oral proficiency for international students and mandatory participation in TA workshops hosted by the Office of Instructional Development ““ use of evaluations was only implemented this past year.
This practice is similar in bioengineering, where TA candidates are screened and interviewed before fulfilling their one quarter of required teaching ““ past performance evaluations, however, are not used.
Without using evaluations, what recourse do undergraduate students have to voice their interests or levels of satisfaction with TA instruction?
It seems that ignoring undergraduate input diminishes the value of quality teaching-assistantship. Enabling use of already available assessments could allow research-oriented graduate students to concentrate on their strong suits, while letting the most capable or most proven teaching-oriented graduate students instruct.
Many departments pointed out that reappointment is rare, thus perhaps nullifying the point that performance evaluations are under-utilized.
I still say that if you’ve got them, use them. Not just the evaluations, but the dynamic and motivated professors-in-training you do have ““ they’re the real under-utilized asset here.
If you want your TA evaluation to be heard, e-mail Aikins at raikins@media.ucla.edu.