Teaching Sociologists to Teach: (Re)Building a Graduate Teaching Seminar in Sociology

• In Event: Teaching and Learning Symposium Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 5: Mentorship and Research in the Classroom

Abstract

A long held and deep secret of academia is that those on the instructor’s side of the classroom are largely untrained and strictly learning on the job. Instructors are often placed in courses based on their expertise and/or research with the presumption that they will figure the teaching part out as they go. In an effort to open up the black box of teaching to the next generation of instructors, we have designed (and implemented) a graduate teaching seminar with the goal of demystifying the profession, building capacity and skills, exploring sociology as both curriculum and pedagogy, critically examining structures of power and institutional domination, and finding creativity and personality in the classroom. We work to empower graduate students before they enter the classroom to explore, discover, embody, and transmit their passion for the field to our students. This presentation will focus on the structure of the seminar, the skills and tools we seek to develop, suggestions for best practices and processes to avoid in instructor training, and qualitative reflections offered by students who have left the seminar and begun teaching undergraduate courses. We feel the model is adaptable to most institutional environments and can both empower new instructors and help expand the reach of our field throughout diverse undergraduate communities.

Authors

• Ryan J. Goodman, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque

• Colin B. Olson, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque