Teacher Training

Methodology
This survey
Limitations/Challenges
See the Survey

Courses & Workshops
Nature of Training
Faculty & Graduate Students
Assessment

Conclusion
Further Study
Appendix A
Works Cited

Finally, the last reason that a study of TA technology training is significant is because it will provide a baseline for and insight into current TA technology training procedures. TA training is essential, especially for those who are inexperienced with digital technologies and new literacies. However, we cannot begin to transform our TA technology training procedures until we better understand the current state of such training, and we have no systematic studies doing exactly that. Thus, this project fills, in part, that gap. In addition, as this project underlines the importance of TA technology training, it simultaneously exposes the challenges such training presents.

First, TA training is crucial for every new teacher, but especially for those inexperienced with digital technologies and new literacies.  It is still abundantly clear that many writing programs use TAs and contract/adjunct staff to teach the first-year composition courses, and it is the program, department, and university’s responsibility to see to it that, one, the TAs are trained properly and, two, students in the first-year composition classroom have fully prepared and qualified teachers. Specifically, writing programs, departments, and universities have academic/professional goals, and without proper TA training teachers of first-year writing cannot help facilitate those goals and agendas.

The importance of TA training is highlighted by the scholarly attention accorded it. For example, Steven Wilhoit highlights several areas where more research is needed on TA development. He asks the following questions:

Are some methods of instruction most helpful to TAs early in their teaching and some most helpful as they near graduation? What is the best way to sequence instruction throughout the years of a TA’s service? More research is needed between TA instructional techniques and gender, race, age, and teaching style. Is the experience of minority TAs in the classroom different than the experience of other TAs? If so, what additional instruction might be needed to prepare all TAs for the classroom? (23)

He also includes other areas for research concerning TA training. In particular, he mentions a need for research on more instruction on teaching in an increasingly diverse student population and an increasingly technological workplace (24). He notes that more research is needed on teaching in different instructional settings such as two-year colleges and high schools, and he addresses employment issues such as TA working conditions ( i.e., assuring them a "living wage" 24).

An important component of Wilhoit’s call for research is training for "an increasingly technological workplace," which leads to the questions that I investigate in this project, for we cannot prepare for the workplace until we have prepared teachers for the increasingly technological classroom. Integral to composition studies’ pedagogical and theoretical agendas has been an exploration of these new literacy practices, of the ways in which technology affects our students as readers and writers. Less prevalent, but equally important, is an investigation of the ways in which teachers are trained in new literacy practices and prepared to make effective use of technology rich environments. We need to train teachers in new media, familiarizing them with the modes of production permeating twenty-first century Western culture. Bertram Bruce investigates "how the nature of texts is changing as they are represented through online communities, websites, video, hypermedia, virtual reality, robotics, and other new technologies" (1). He concludes that teachers

[r]ightly wonder how to assess the changes they see in the new information age and what learning experiences can best prepare students for it. There are calls now for computer training as a core component of literacy and worries about issues such as the quality of website content and the need for new literacy skills. (7)

Because of the new media tools available to represent meaning, literacy practices have expanded, requiring us, as Doug Hartman points out, to develop new methods of literacy teaching inviting students to move among various technologies (282). Hartman claims:

With expanded conceptions of literacy and the media tools to represent meaning in other modes, a new set of literacy practices will be needed to operate in a transmediatory fashion—working back and forth across media, from print to video to sculpture to iconic notations to music and so on. (282)

If a graduate program has a cadre of graduate students who are proficient in print literacy but not in this new literacy, then that program will need to train students in the new technologies. Once trained in new technologies, graduate students will need to be trained to teach first and foremost in technology rich environments. This is a pressing concern as more classrooms, both in postsecondary and K-12 institutions, are responding to the call for greater computer competence by incorporating an element of new literacy in their educational goals. Thus, a question we must confront, then, is whether that training is occurring and, if so, what is the nature of that training.  This brief survey offers some clues as to what is occurring in the way of teacher training and digital technologies.

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