This study examined the relationships between faculty and their teaching assistants in an undergraduate teaching assistant program developed at Northeastern University in the US to ease the challenges faculty faced in incorporating Service-Learning into their teaching. Feedback from faculty suggested that the undergraduates trained to assist them with purely logistical tasks were becoming partners in teaching. To explore the relationship between faculty and their teaching assistants and better understand how the faculty may have come to view the teaching assistants as partners, we conducted in-depth interviews with faculty across a range of academic disciplines and experience levels who had worked with one or more undergraduate teaching assistants. The data revealed that while the faculty participants did appreciate receiving logistical assistance with Service-Learning, they also benefited from partnering with students as colleagues who supported their teaching more broadly. We also found that faculty viewed the partnership in different ways depending on their level of experience with Service-Learning pedagogy.
Design studies are frequently used to conduct problem-driven visualization research by working with real-world domain experts. In visualization pedagogy, design studies are often introduced but rarely practiced due to their large time requirements. This limits students to a classroom curriculum, often involving projects that may not have implications beyond the classroom. Thus we present the Design Study "Lite" Methodology, a novel framework for implementing design studies with novice students in 14 weeks. We utilized the Design Study "Lite" Methodology in conjunction with Service-Learning to teach five Data Visualization courses and demonstrate that it benefits not only the students but also the community through service to non-profit partners. In this paper, we provide a detailed breakdown of the methodology and how Service-Learning can be incorporated with it. We also include an extensive reflection on the methodology and provide recommendations for future applications of the framework for teaching visualization courses and research.
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