Graduate students teach within the complex higher education environment of financial constraint, greater student diversity, and growing graduate enrolment (e.g., Austin, 2003). Teaching roles offer financial support and skill development while multiplying responsibilities (Price, 2008). Across the national working papers and institutional reports,…

Many Canadian universities have created professional development programs for their teaching assistants (TA) but may be uncertain about how to bridge the gap between TAs' knowledge of effective teaching strategies and TAs' confident applications of these strategies. We present a technique used in a two-day training workshop to enhance graduate…

Since the 1980s, research on employment conditions in post-secondary institutions has focused on the growth of contingent academic workers, or what the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) has labelled "non-full- time instructors" (Field, Jones, Stephenson, & Khoyetsyan, 2014). Very little attention, however, has been…

This paper presents preliminary findings from a pilot study whose purpose was to explore how we, a tenure-track faculty member and a doctoral student, understood and developed our teaching practice when engaged in a formal faculty-student relationship. Using a hybrid of collaborative inquiry and collaborative self-study--which included verbal and…

In this study, we compared the effects of a traditional teaching assistant (TA) training program to those of a specialized program, with a substantial intercultural component, for international graduate students. We expected both programs to result in an increase in international graduate students' teaching self-efficacy, observed teaching…

Increasingly, graduate teaching assistants serve as the primary instructors in undergraduate courses, yet research has shown that training and development for these teaching assistants is often lacking in programs throughout the United States and Canada. Providing mentoring and skill development opportunities for graduate teaching assistants is…

Rising rates of unionization in university settings suggest that campus labour disputes are likely to become an increasingly relevant issue. The research question in the current analysis asked which factors contributed to students' perception of fair treatment following a university labour disruption. A longitudinal survey of students' experiences…

This study explores how teaching development programs may facilitate the development of intercultural competence in graduate students and prepare them for communicating effectively in the global workplace after graduation. First, we describe the concept of intercultural teaching competence and examine the skills that graduate students may need to…

In recent years, much attention has been given to the need for more empirical research to evaluate training programs that help prepare graduate students for their current and future teaching responsibilities. The present study investigated the effectiveness of a training workshop for graduate students who had varying levels of experience and…

This article describes the design and implementation of a workshop on teaching and learning for graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) in a Faculty of Science at a major Canadian research-intensive university. The approach borrows heavily from an existing successful workshop for faculty but is tailored specifically to the needs of GTAs in science in…

Teaching assistants are unionized at most large Ontario and British Columbia universities. The institutions tend to be urban, have large graduate enrollments, and have faced greater budgetary concerns at the time of unionization. Canada's public policy and labor relations decisions have favored unionization more than the United States's have. (MSE)

A survey of the efforts of Canadian colleges to train teaching assistants is reported, and the Simon Fraser University Teaching Assistant Training Programme is discussed. Focus is on components of the instruction offered to teaching assistants and representative data from an evaluation of the program. (JMD)

A survey of Canadian universities identified six offering graduate students credit courses on university teaching/learning. Limited resources restrict the numbers who take the courses. Half are sponsored by graduate schools. Benefits of the courses are noted and factors to consider in initiating similar courses are suggested. (Author/MSE)

Conceptualization and implementation of a program to train university teaching assistants at McGill University (Quebec) are described. The systematic approach to program development included needs assessment, planning and implementation, and evaluation. The relationship between various levels of the institution and the way in which they have…