Like countless graduate-student teaching assistants before him, Bret Eynon stepped before his first class of undergraduates bewildered and poorly trained.
“I swear, the word ‘teaching’ was never uttered in my program, much less ‘pedagogy,’ much less ‘student learning,’” says Mr. Eynon, who earned his Ph.D. in history from New York University in 1993 and is now LaGuardia Community College’s associate dean for academic affairs. “There was no consciousness that this was actually what you would spend a big chunk of your time doing.”
In recent years, graduate programs have placed more emphasis on training students to be instructors. Part of that change is because today’s Ph.D.s may need to lean more on their teaching skills than their research acumen as the number of tenure-track faculty positions shrinks. However, the training often focuses on preparing Ph.D. recipients to teach at a research university, not at a community college, where a growing number of Ph.D.s are expected to work.
Mr. Eynon hopes that a $3.15-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the City University of New York’s Graduate Center will spur change in how academe prepares its graduate-student teachers, and better train them for careers at community colleges, which serve nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates.
During a four-year pilot program that starts next fall, 27 Ph.D. students at the Graduate Center will teach a wide range of humanities courses, including reading, writing, history, the arts, social sciences, and gender studies, at LaGuardia rather than at their own college. It’s the first program that places graduate fellows into community-college classrooms as the primary instructors, and “is a redefinition of graduate training,” says Cathy N. Davidson, an English professor at the Graduate Center.
The students will shadow experienced LaGuardia faculty and spend a semester learning about the unique challenges of teaching community-college students before they lead classes.
Empowering Students
Mr. Eynon says that LaGuardia is at “the front edge” of higher education’s student-demographics change, and that many Ph.D. programs are not prepared for the shift. More than 60 percent of LaGuardia’s students are foreign-born, and they come from more than 150 countries, so the Graduate Center students will need training in how to work with students who speak English as a second language. Community colleges in general serve lower-income students. At LaGuardia, more than two-thirds of students come from families earning less than $25,000 a year.
The doctoral students will have to think about how to teach students who may not know the basics of U.S. or New York history or may be lacking in other areas taken for granted among a nonimmigrant population, says Luke Waltzer, director of the Teaching and Learning Center at the Graduate Center.
The program at CUNY is an acknowledgment by academe that doctoral students need to be trained for careers outside of universities.
Ms. Davidson says the LaGuardia students will benefit from the teaching techniques the graduate students are expected to use. The goal, she says, is for the Ph.D. students to empower the students and make their needs the focus of the learning process. The doctoral students will develop their own specific techniques, but one of Ms. Davidson’s favorites is starting the class by leaving the room and allowing the students to create their own “class constitution” that governs expectations and the relationship that will exist between student and instructor. “The goal is to have students take complete responsibility for their education,” she says.
While the program benefits a relatively small number of doctoral students, Ms. Davidson says she hopes it will have an impact that goes beyond the Graduate Center. The project, she says, is a powerful acknowledgment by academe that Ph.D. students need to be trained for careers outside of universities because there simply aren’t enough tenure-track jobs to go around anymore.
“I said in 1993 when I was president of the American Studies Association that we would be eating our young if we didn’t worry about the adjunct crisis,” Ms. Davidson says. “You can’t keep training graduate students for nonemployment without destroying your profession.”
Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.
