Becoming partners: Faculty come to appreciate undergraduates as teaching partners in a service-learning teaching assistant program

Abstract

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.

Maximizing the role of undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) to match signature pedagogies in leadership education

“…First, navigating compensation can be difficult. Instructors can compensate UTAs for their contributions to the classroom with stipends, work-study (if students are eligible), course credit or volunteer hours (Begley et al. , 2019).…”

“…First, navigating compensation can be difficult. Instructors can compensate UTAs for their contributions to the classroom with stipends, work-study (if students are eligible), course credit or volunteer hours (Begley et al, 2019). Instructors who pay UTAs should recognize that the stipend amount sends a clear message to students about the importance of their work, so stipends should be commensurate with the role's demands (Prieto, 2003).…”

Students as partners in China: Investigating the potentials and possibilities for growing practices across universities

“…According to Western research, engaging students in teaching has achieved various meaningful effects. For example, in a service-learning teaching assistant program, Begley et al (2019) reported the benefits of involving students who introduced new insights to enhance teaching and learning approaches and who also eased the burden of teachers by partnering as undergraduate student teaching assistants in the program. A stronger learnerteacher relationship that improved mutual understanding by involving an undergraduate student as teaching assistant was also indicated by Daniello and Acquaviva (2019).…”

Student Activism in Higher Education: The politics of students’ role in hegemonic university change

“…In reality, the presentation of SaP opportunities is a spectrum which shifts across institutions that adopt it (in superficial modes: Begley et al, 2019;in authentic modes: Matear et al, 2018).…”