Jen Brondell, Clemson University, South Carolina, USA
Tracey McGee, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois, USA

TESOL’s 2022 International Convention in Pittsburgh this year was a wonderful experience giving many of us the opportunity to reconnect and recharge. For some, like us, it was also an opportunity to share our ITA program developments in the hopes of informing and inspiring others. This newsletter gives us yet another opportunity to share with our ITA community the work that we have been doing and how it has brought us visibility and positive responses within our institutions by discussing our presentation titled “Increasing Program Visibility While Empowering International Teaching Assistants.”

To start, we began by sharing about our respective programs. Jen is at Clemson University where 21% of graduate students are international and the undergraduate international population is miniscule. Her program is under the Office of Global Engagement, which is under the Provost’s office. She is the only person in her program and has built the ITA Program, and other programs she runs, from scratch. Fall 2021 she tested about 70 incoming ITAs.

Tracey is at Illinois Tech where 37% of the overall population is international. She is housed within the College of Science and Letters and her department offers multiple English Programs. There are six full-time faculty for those programs and one full-time staff member. For the 21-22 academic year there were about 100 TAs, both international and domestic.

At neither institution was there an established TA or ITA training program, so next we talked about how we built our respective programs. Jen took over the state mandated ITA testing from the Emeritus College, who had done testing and loose support for the past 15+ years. She re-did the rubric, moved the testing to Zoom, trained new raters, included inter-rater reliability with the zoom videos, and added a short teaching sample to the test. In Fall of 2021 the first support class was held that met once a week that was not onerous for students, but did require students to meet outside of class once a week with a conversation partner, that she arranged. Finally, in Spring 2022, testing information and feedback to students and departments was put on the Canvas platform; the first-time test-takers were given any feedback from their test.

Tracey was tasked not only with supporting ITAs, but all TAs. She first conducted surveys, interviews and focus groups in Spring of 2021 and in the Fall of 2021 launched the revised and required seminar support course that met for 50 minutes twice a week for 10 weeks, having been expanded from six weeks previously. The course, like Jen’s at Clemson, is a zero-credit course offered at no charge to the students. Tracey used an interactive teaching model to target international students’ needs and policies while reaching the domestic TA population, as well. She had 72 students in Fall of 2021 and 30 in the Spring of 2022, and about 80-90% of the enrolled students were ITAs.

So what have we learned so far from developing our programs? Jen learned that requiring a course is okay provided there are limited out of class assignments, and that testing over Zoom allows for the important inter-rater reliability. Zoom also has given her the chance to offer the test before students arrive, helping departments to make decisions sooner about assistantship placement. (She has learned that departments love to feel like they are being considered in the process, by the way, and this creates important ally relationships). But she also learned that it is pointless to have a teaching sample if elements of it are not included in the grading rubric, and that as a program with no budget and a staff of one, she needs to charge departments for the test.

For Tracey, she learned that making the class ten weeks instead of six weeks was a huge gain, along with requiring that students meet twice a week during their campus-wide lunch hour. She also learned that by meeting in-person she could make it a very interactive and engaging hour for the students, even for those that felt it a useless obligation initially. Her frequent shifting of the class format kept students’ attention during class, and like Jen, not making out of class work onerous was important to the success of the class. On the other hand, Tracey learned that the 50-minute class sessions were difficult to manage and that her guest speakers, though necessary and relevant, often struggled to make their sessions engaging and interactive.

But what about visibility? How did any of what we did make our programs more visible, or make us more respected as colleagues and not “just ESL?” For Jen, departments saw the added value of being able to access student results and recommendations in Canvas, and within those recommendations they learned about other services offered within her program, such as coaching and conversation groups. This is great because her program is brand new! Additionally, because ITA testing and support is written into Clemson’s Graduate School Policy Handbook, the graduate school helps with communications and compliance, which brings Jen together with the Associate Deans and Dean of the Graduate School. This has led to her giving workshops in the Graduate School’s Professional Development program where she has even greater access to her population. It doesn’t hurt to have allies in the Graduate School, and now as a “known” colleague, she has been invited to participate in committees related to not only TA training, but inclusive excellence initiatives, as well.

For Tracey, teaching the entire group of new TAs created visibility to the support services available to her institution’s international undergraduate population, as well as the services available to the ITAs, themselves. Because her class is for all TAs in all departments, she has better collaboration with the academic units and she communicates with people all across campus; she is the “known” colleague and faculty member for ESL. What’s more, because her class is not just for international students, is not just about language, and is classified as a Humanities course, she is slowly but surely being recognized as more than just “ESL faculty.” In her class she introduces the TAs to best teaching practices, classroom management, campus policies and resources, and more.

What changes do we hope to make in the future to the programs? Looking forward, Jen plans to work on re-doing the rubric, developing more training for the raters, incorporating mandatory classes for ITAs not previously required to participate, developing options for pre-arrival and first-semester training, and implementing a newly approved testing fee.

Tracey hopes to develop programming for TAs beyond the seminar course, including workshops, mentoring and tutoring, social events, training during orientation, and specialized programming and training specific to the needs of ITAs. She also hopes to develop guidelines and recommendations for all departments on training their TAs specific to the needs of each department.

Overall, it has been an exciting year for these two programs at Clemson and Illinois Tech with the added benefit of increasing visibility for all of our programs and our work above and beyond the training that we offer our international teaching assistants. When we launched these programs, we believed we were the last two universities developing new TA/ITA training programs and the prospect felt a bit daunting and very overwhelming. Despite being an incredible challenge, creating programs from scratch with very limited resources has also been tremendously rewarding especially during a time of such uncertainty in the field of international higher education. After having read this, we hope you will reach out to us if you want to ask any questions or brainstorm with us about the future!

Tracey McGee is Senior Lecturer and Director of English Language Services at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In addition to overseeing all of the university’s multiple English language programs, she became responsible for revising and offering a TA seminar course in fall 2021. Contact Tracey at tmcgee@iit.edu.