Morag C. Burke, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

As I reflected on what to write about for this article on the adaptations I have made in my ITA program in response to Covid-19, I have been overwhelmed by the need to pin down one experience or idea to share that may be helpful, useful or insightful to my wonderful ITA colleagues. As I have reflected on my professional and personal experiences throughout the pandemic, one overarching theme emerges: adapting to constant change. The necessity of navigating continually changing circumstances and shifting parameters for decision-making is ongoing as I write this article and as a new variant is beginning to spread worldwide. Although this current Fall semester of 2021 has been our first semester back to teaching in person at Georgia Tech since the pandemic started, it seems entirely possible that we may need to pivot back to online instruction for the Spring semester of 2022. In the background throughout this experience is my worry and concern for my students, for the undergraduate students, and for upholding the integrity and positive impact of my ITA program. The specifics of my institutional context and the program framework that I am functioning within are clearly particular to my situation; however, I believe that my experiences of constantly adapting are a common one among my ITA professional colleagues as I look back on my work since March 2020.

As the Director of International Instructor Training in the School of Math at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, my responsibilities include training ITAs and domestic TAs, international postdocs, and occasionally working with new international faculty. In this current Fall semester of 2021, returning to in-person teaching has been a troubling experience for many of us as universities have become politicized spaces. In my institution, the science of preventing Covid spread, such as being vaccinated, wearing masks, and social distancing, have been at odds with policies determined at the state level, and at odds with what we are allowed to require in the classrooms.

Since all of our TAs, including our ITAs, have been required to teach in person this semester, much of my concern has been focused on creating safe teaching environments for all TAs and for their undergraduate students. The changes that I implemented have grown out of this concern. Addressing health risks has meant parsing the university-level policies and creating ways to safely navigate the physical spaces in the classrooms. In addition, this has meant allowing our TAs some latitude to adapt their teaching style away from research-based pedagogy, such as active learning, that includes activities that are pair-based or group-based in order to avoid close contact between undergraduate students. Creating the boundaries around allowing this latitude in teaching required multiple lengthy discussions with my colleagues which were grounded in empowering our TAs to use safe teaching practices in spite of the requirement to teach in person. Balancing concerns for the health of the TAs and the undergraduate students has been the guiding principle for re-imagining the ITA training this semester. Re-examining and revising the pedagogy that is embedded in TA training, including lessons for ITAs, has been an ongoing challenge.

Throughout the current Fall 2021 semester, while I have taught my ITA training course, I have examined each of my lessons to determine what is the most effective method of teaching to achieve the learning outcomes. I decided to implement a format for my ITA course this semester that included in-person classroom-based learning (the format determined by the university), while augmenting these lessons with virtual lessons whenever online learning would be more effective. For example, teaching a pronunciation lesson with a mask on, and with students who also have masks on, is only effective up to a certain point. I managed this issue by typically introducing the pronunciation point in an in-person lesson to establish the concepts and learning objectives. I often started with some in-person practice with our masks on. After all, the reality is that the ITAs must be able to be understood with their masks on for their own in-person teaching. The subsequent online follow up lesson allowed us to practice together with our masks off, so that I could see and hear what was going on for each student as they worked on producing a particular pronunciation point. It also allowed students to see my face close up which is very helpful when teaching the mechanics of producing a particular sound. I have also included online pair work and small group work as homework for my students throughout the pandemic. Before the pandemic began, I was already using online one-on-one meetings as a tool for tutoring and working with individual ITAs to address their specific issues, so expanding the use of this approach was a natural progression for my courses this semester.

Every August, I develop and facilitate a two-week intensive orientation and onboarding program for the new graduate students, all of whom have teaching duties in the School of Math. This includes domestic TAs and ITAs. In August 2020, I shifted this program to a fully online format due to the pandemic. You may recall that in the summer of 2020, many of our international graduate students were unable to secure their visas to enter the U.S. to begin their graduate programs. The administration at Georgia Tech was able to create a new status for enrolled international graduate students to study remotely from abroad and begin their graduate programs in spite of their inability to secure a visa. This was unprecedented, thus many questions needed to be addressed about how the courses and program would be implemented. I want to note here that the decision to allow international students to register and study from abroad was made only a few weeks before the beginning of the orientation program in the Fall 2020 semester. The absence of lead time to fully and thoroughly prepare for this change in circumstances meant that many adaptations were made in real time with the students. The impact of this new scenario cut to the core of every premise upon which the ITA training program was based.

Roughly half of my new incoming international graduate students in Fall 2020 registered from abroad and spent the first year of their doctoral programs learning remotely. This meant that those students were attending my courses online from time zones with 11- and 12-hour time differences from the Atlanta based course schedule. In addition, they were attending other classes in the middle of the night or relying solely on recorded lectures for their graduate learning. This caused my ITA students a lot of stress and resulted in health issues as the academic year progressed. I felt determined to assist my students and ameliorate this situation as much as possible.

One adaptation that I made to my course in Fall 2020 was to create a sub-group within my course for the students who were studying from abroad. I taught this group in the evenings at a non-scheduled time, to relieve some of the pressure of attending my class during the scheduled time, which was late at night in their time zones. I was conscious of pairing the students for homework assignments with other students in a similar time zone. I added new assignments to the syllabus which required students to speak in English daily (online) as a substitute for the daily conversations that would have naturally occurred in a normal semester just by being in shared offices with each other, walking the halls of the department, and running into professors and other grad students because of being in the same physical space. I gave my students interview assignments with various faculty and staff in the department. I aimed to create a parallel experience for my ITA through these assignments. They were lacking the experience of meeting and connecting with the people that they would have normally interacted with in their first semester in the department. As much as possible, I aimed to create the connectivity for my students that first-year graduate students would form in a normal in-person first semester. The faculty and administrative staff were thrilled to participate as they were equally feeling isolated and experiencing the loss of connection to the students.

I became concerned about the mental health of all my students as our period of isolation extended, but I was especially concerned about my students who were abroad. I scheduled regular one-on-one meetings with students to check in on their academic progress through my course, but also to provide regular contact and a sounding board for their questions and worries. In some cases, I had discussions with their concerned parents to help with decision making about a variety of academic concerns. Two of my students opted to defer the start of their programs to Fall 2021; however, I kept in touch with these two students by email throughout the year and met with each of them online every semester to ensure that they were doing well through the pandemic and to ensure that they remained in touch with the program.

The content of the ITA training courses necessitated examining effective online teaching, in parallel with my own exploration of how to best meet the learning needs of my international students. My observation was that since the beginning of the pandemic the ITA training courses have served a deeper role in the lives of my students by providing a support group sharing insight into the evolving teaching scenarios and requirements and creating connection to each other and the program in an otherwise isolating situation. At the core of these adaptations has been a more urgent need for creating a sense of community, stability and support for the ITAs. Navigating ongoing change both inside and outside of our ITA programs in response to the global pandemic is a skill that has been evolving for me and my ITA students, and we can realistically anticipate that we will need to remain flexible for the foreseeable future.