ITAIS Newsletter - December 2022 (Plain Text Version)

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In this issue:
LEADERSHIP UPDATES
•  LETTER FROM CHAIR
•  LETTER FROM CHAIR ELECT
•  LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
ARTICLES
•  RESPONDING TO THE PUSHBACK ON ITA TESTING
•  MAKING 360 VIRTUAL REALITY VIDEOS FOR ITA PRACTICE
•  TEACHING INNOVATIONS: BY MULTIPLE AUTHORS
•  LET'S GET TOGETHER: THE STAYING POWER OF A PANDEMIC-INDUCED WORKING GROUP
ABOUT THIS COMMUNITY
•  ITAIS COMMUNITY EVENTS UPDATE
•  CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR ITAIS NEWSLETTER
•  TESOL ITA-IS NEW MEMBERS

TEACHING INNOVATIONS: BY MULTIPLE AUTHORS

Haley Dolosic, Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA
Ekaterina Arshavskaya and Suzie Ji, Utah State University, UT, USA

Haley Dolosic

Ekaterina Arshavskaya

Suzie Ji

Leveraging Zoom Interviews to Welcome ITA Voices to the Classroom

As many ITA professionals are all too aware, there is a need for international students to hear about learning and teaching in the U.S. higher education context as they embark on their first teaching experiences. As part of teaching orientation, many schools encourage or require new ITAs to attend panel discussions where they can hear from international students who have taught at the very school where they are planning to teach. Learning outcomes for these sessions include gaining a better sense of their future students’ expectations and understanding more classroom dynamics. Yet, depending upon the program, organizing such a panel might be difficult, as the panel would need to be present for multiple courses or in varied semesters depending upon the ebb and flow of ITAs taking on their classroom roles. Further, for some ITA programs with limited budgets and time with students, organizing a panel of ITAs from previous years while also welcoming a new set of students to attend at a specific time and location has become an increasing struggle in the semesters since COVID-19 reshaped how we do in-person and virtual higher education. Therefore, with limited time and resources, we sought to develop a panel that could be an “on-demand” resource for our ITA students.

To address this concern, we employed the skills and strategies we had learned across two years of remote teaching with Zoom in our toolkit, we reached out to international students who had taught at our institution in the last five years, online and in-person, to see who might be willing to talk with us for thirty minutes. With six students agreeing to these conversations in Spring of 2022, we began compiling questions. After discussing this panel with current students in our Language, Culture, & Interaction Strategies for Instruction course, we created a list of five questions to ask the students about their experiences. Our questions were:

(1) Tell us about you! What is your name? What do you study? And what was your relationship to teaching before teaching at our university?

(2) What’s something that you found challenging or surprising when you came to teach in the U.S.?

(3) What was one strategy you used to make communication easier with your students? When you had difficulty understanding or being understood, was there something that worked really well for you?

(4) What university resources did you use to gain more comfort in the classroom? What resources outside of the university did you use to grow your teaching or communication skill for the classroom?

(5) How did you use your experiences from your earlier studies and your earlier life to support your teaching?

After we had the questions and the meetings set-up, it was up to me to meet with each student and talk through these questions. With five former ITAs, I was able to gather responses that I could share with my class in just two and half hours of time spent on Zoom. Each interviewee agreed to be recorded for the purposes of being part of the panel in my class. To make them a little more comfortable on camera and also prevent them from preparing too much, I sent the questions a few hours ahead of our meetings. After the meeting, I gathered the Zoom recordings into one video (editing out my own appearances). This process was simple: I saved the recordings locally rather than to a cloud, then I imported them to the basic video editing software that came with my laptop, and finally I cut down and reorganized segments so that they would flow together around our five questions. Then, I posted the video and required my students to watch and reflect before coming to class. To ensure their viewing, they were asked to submit a short reflection to tell me their initial thoughts as they watched the video panel. Finally, to complete the activity, I had my students discuss their reactions with each other. We talked about the key insights each had drawn from the conversations, and we talked about how their own experiences had been or would be similar or different from what was described. Notably, students were interested to hear about the experiences of an international student from Ireland who had taught in the U.S. She described challenges that mirrored students who did not grow up speaking English, and they were shocked to learn that even “native speakers” must adjust for their audiences in classrooms! Further, ITAs from previous semesters highlighted strengths of multiple support programs on our campuses and encouraged students to use their own knowledge to help their students gain a deeper understanding of the content they were discussing. For example, one student from China helped students to understand proofs by explaining how they were taught in both China and the U.S. By discussing these two approaches with students, he helped them to see that there were multiple ways to reach the intended goal.

Discussion

As our international students embark on the complex challenges around teaching in a new culture, language, and context, hearing the voices of colleagues who have come before can provide a space for students to discuss their concerns and hear about real experiences of those who have come before them. Through a Zoom panel that is patched together in a single video, our students were able to hear multiple perspectives, learn about resources available to them, and feel empowered to teach in a way that honors their unique backgrounds and the knowledge that these experiences afford.

Collaborating with a graduate student on an ITA program review

The training course for international TAs at Utah State University (USU), known as the IELI 7920 International TA Workshop, welcomes around 50-60 international graduate students yearly. However, since its inception in the 70-s within USU, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been conducted a program-level review of the training opportunities available to international TAs at USU. Due to the COVID-19 related budget cuts, the program has also been condensed and changed to fit the online (rather than FTF) format since 2020. Therefore, the goals of our collaborative project were three-fold:

1. Prepare and conduct a survey of the participating international TAs to learn how well the current online preparation program addresses their needs;

2. Conduct a literature review focusing on the major innovative trends in the international TA programs in U.S. universities;

3. Analyze the findings from the survey and the literature review and suggest changes to implement in the existing program during the following academic year.

The survey created by our team and disseminated among the workshop participants (international TAs) sought the answers to some of the following questions:

1. To what extent did the online workshop (ITA training program) help you create effective teaching/learning environments here, at USU?
2. To what extent did the workshop help you develop and maintain effective relationships with faculty and students at USU?
3. To what extent did the online format of the course address your needs as an international TA?

The findings will generate insights grounded in both research and practice to innovate the existing international TA preparation program at USU to better reflect the needs of the participating TAs and to emulate some of the best practices recommended in the field.