Slavic Field

[andrea nelson]

Dear Listmembers:

I wanted to respond to Ben Rifkin's recent posting in which he disagrees
with those who would argue that "graduate student teaching assistants should
not be entrusted with the teaching of introductory and intermediate Russian
classes" and in which he cogently lists the reasons why they can be and are
so effective in the classroom.

First, just to clarify, I don't think that anyone was suggesting or arguing
that graduate students shouldn't be entrusted with the teaching of
introductory and intermediate Russian classes.  I think that for all of the
reasons that Ben listed graduate students should be entrusted with teaching
responsibilities at these or even at higher levels.  However, I think that
the argument should be made that graduate students should not be WHOLLY
entrusted with macrocurricular resposibilities of course design and all that
this entails.  In fact, Ben alludes to this when he emphasizes that graduate
teaching assistants should be trained, encouraged, and nurtured throughout
their tenure as beginning level and intermediate level language instructors
of undergraduate Russian students.  This training, encouragement, and
nurturing should and could ideally be the responsibility of a faculty mentor
in the ways in which Ben suggests.  However, I think the point needs to be
made that the core of the course design and its implementation needs to be
consistent from year to year (with enough flexibility of course to change
with the times).  This should be consistency not only diachronically from
first year Russian to second year Russian to third year Russian and beyond
(a problem of program articulation) but also synchronically (if I can use
this term this way) within each level from academic year to academic year
despite the changing teaching roster at these levels.  At times it is often
the case that there is little articulation between language levels because
the instructors at each level don't communicate either effectively or at all
and the furthermore teaching assistants, left without the benefit of past
experience that mentoring can provide, end up reinventing wheels year after
year.


Andrea