Greetings from Mizzou!

I’m Liz Tummons and I’m looking forward to serving you as the incoming chair this next year. I think many of you know me or at least know about me, but as background, I come from an ITA program where I am the only full-time employee. This means I have to wear many hats—teaching, training, evaluating, and, of course, “encouraging” departments to comply with university requirements (and the state laws that led to those requirements).

In December, my ITA program was thrown quite a curveball. One of the responsibilities our state law requires is a "cultural orientation" for new ITAs. We provide a 3-day workshop full of information, interactions with successful ITAs and American undergraduates, and opportunities for the new ITAs to teach and receive feedback. It is often the beginning of a long and positive relationship between ITAs and our program. It helps new ITAs start strong and, even if they don't, they are given a solid framework for discussion and change if things don't go so well.

Unfortunately, because of a change in the hiring policy at the university, I've had to scrap the whole orientation this month. As I have scrambled to put previously-recorded presentations online, figure out ways to hold ITAs accountable for going through the information, and all-in-all piece together some sort of (hopefully) effective orientation, I've had only one solace: the ITAIS will have answers for me at TESOL this spring.

Not knowing all this would happen, I serendipitously set up the ITAIS academic session with the topic "Creating Culturally Competent International Teaching Assistants." From the beginning, I hoped that this would be a very practical session with research that could easily be applied because so many of us are primarily practitioners. Now, I'm more interested than ever to understand the formats different universities use, the priorities they set in training, how to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs, and what ITAs think about their own development of cultural awareness.

Of course, I’m not just looking forward to this presentation. Being somewhat of a lone ranger of ITA programming at my university, the sessions, the articles, and the interactions with the ITAIS are my primary source of ideas and support.

Can’t wait to see you all in March,

Liz