Please register for this workshop using this form.
Teaching in a college classroom creates many new opportunities; it also carries with it certain challenges. This is especially true for international students. For this reason, the Center for Teaching is excited to offer an international TA working group.
This working group will be a four-week virtual learning community. Our first session will focus on understanding how our intersectional identities shape how we think about teaching and learning. Moreover, we will dedicate a portion of this session to empowering our identities as international scholars and being aware that these identities can serve as frames of reference to understand what is happening in the classroom. We will provide space to discuss and work through some of the unique challenges of serving as an instructor while being an international student. This will lead to our second session, where we will focus on the culture of American classrooms and the “Unspoken Truths” about American classrooms. We will discuss the main characteristics of the US classroom and reflect on how this differs from our previous understandings and prior experiences in our home countries. The learning goal of our third meeting is to develop pedagogical skills to advance international graduate students’ adaptation to the US classroom and to provide international TA's with a space for building their own tools for better performance. For our final session, we will wrap up and reflect on what we have taken from this learning group and offer a panel of experienced international professionals that will be available for questions and to share their journeys.
Dates: Session 1: Wednesday, April 5th Session 2: Wednesday, April 12th
Session 3: Wednesday, April 19th
Session 4: Wednesday, May 3rd (non-mandatory)
Time: 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm (CDT) Each meeting day
Location: Zoom (you will receive the link in the confirmation emails)
Facilitators: Nauff Zakaria and Eugenia Zavaleta