Postgraduate teachers of English: Support, recognition and integration

a Higher Education Academy event

Eugene Giddens, Anglia Ruskin University,with Tiffani Angus and Louis Ells

• 10.00-10.15: registration and coffee• 10.15-10.45: keynote address and welcome• 10.45-12.15: open session on challenges of

PhD teaching• 12.15-1.00: lunch• 1.00-4.00: break-out sessions [3pm coffee]• 4.00-4.30: closing session

Programme

• Introductions• US models for graduate teaching• UK models• Systemic pressures• Institutional pressures• Pedagogic pressures

Introductory Address

• Studentship based upon teaching.• ‘TA’ model or ‘101’ model.• typically heavy ‘load’.• functions to conduct majority of departmental teaching.• designed in a system where average PhD in English takes 9.0 years (MLA

survey data from 2009: http://www.mla.org/blog&topic=143).• (was 5.4 years in 1967.)• GTA provision is growing in US.• UK institutions increasingly adopting the US model.

The US GTA

• ‘Non-tenure-track faculty members now constitute a majority of the faculty in higher education in the United States and Canada... both students and institutions will be better served when policy and practice reflect the important role played by those professionals’ (MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession, ‘Professional Employment Practices for Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members: Recommendations and Evaluative Questions’, Profession (2011), 259-63, 259).

• 1970 = 22%; 1998 = 40% (Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Bob’s Jobs: Campus Crises and “Adjunct” Education’, Profession (1998), 235-41, 239).

US Casualisation of Academic Labour

• ‘The full range of labor performed by non-tenure-track faculty members should be supported, recognized, and developed to nurture the intellectual and academic engagement that is vital to all instructional work in higher education’ (ibid, 262).

• ‘More than a third of academics are on temporary contracts as universities casualise their workforces’ (Anna Fazackerley, ‘Why are many academics on short-term contracts for years?’, The Guardian, 4 February 2013, online.)

• Koos Couvée, ‘Postgraduate students are being used as “slave labour”’, The Independent, 27 May 2012, online.

• Jonathan Wolff, ‘Graduate student teachers should demand professional status’, The Guardian 26 March 2012, online.

UK Resistance to Casualisation of Academic Labour

Financial Pressures:• - on institutions: REF, HPL budgets• - on PhD students: working for free? working

to ‘build CV’?

Systemic Pressures

‘In my first year of university, the vast majority of my seminars were led by PhD students, and although on the whole they were competent at teaching, our contact with the real experts, those we thought we would be getting, was reduced further. What exactly are arts students at Russell Group universities paying for?’ (Neha-Tamara Patel, ‘Elite universities are better for students? I don’t think so’, The Guardian, 15 July 2010, online).

Undergraduate Backlash

- ‘[A] PhD student recounted how he was required to supervise 13 undergraduate dissertations involving hours of daily unpaid work’ (Koos Couvée, ‘Postgraduate students are being used as “slave labour”’, The Independent, 27 May 2012, online.)‘...the lack of paid teaching opportunities for students was an ongoing problem at [my university] that starved students of vital skills to help them further their careers’ (Elizabeth Gibney, ‘PhD teaching quid pro quo without the quid (or goes)’, THE, 13 September 2012, online.)

- Training opportunities- Restrictions (e.g. levels, types of course)- Amounts of teaching (in ‘Guidelines on teaching experience for PhD students’, MML at Cambridge recommends 2-8 hours per year, http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/german/courses/pgrad/tchgexp.pdf)- When to start?

Pedagogic pressures: Quality concerns with the student experience

Pedagogic pressures: New challenges in UK HE

- Learning objectives- Employability- Virtual Learning/MOOCs- Office hours and space- email

Pedagogic pressures: New challenges in UK HE

- access to assessment (e.g. exams)- marking and marking loads- module/course/paper design- Student and/or teacher? (societies, social events, departmental vibe)- Elements of good practice in the light of these pressures?

Research-led teaching: ‘English has been rather slow to embrace the undergraduate research movement...’ (Joyce Kindead and Laurie Grobman, ‘Expanding Opportunities for Undergraduate Research in English Studies’, Profession (2011), 218-30, 218).

Research-led teaching: What elements of your research are easy to teach?What elements of your research are difficult to teach?

Research-led teaching: - being required to teach in your research area- being banned from teaching in your research area- dissertations- undergraduate researcher schemes- bringing research into the classroom- taking research out of the classroom- researching the non-canonical- joint projects and joint publication- pressures of levels