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Communicate: Strategies for International Teaching Assistants is a workbook designed to prepare international teaching assistants (ITAs) in their roles as educators of U.S. undergraduates. Each section, ranging from “Introducing a Syllabus” to “Defining a Term,” integrates exercises on teaching strategies, language skills and cultural awareness, the three areas that authors Janice Smith, Colleen Meyers, Amy Burkhalter consider key to ITA development. Exercises like “The Ideal University Level Teacher in My Culture and in the United States ” and “Characteristics of the Average U.S. Undergraduate Student” are clearly designed to facilitate discussion and thereby point to how the workbook is of little use to ITAs in search of a self-guided reference and training manual. At the same time exercises frequently pitch ITA opinions against “native English-speaker opinion” that, in my view, harm meaningful discussions about successful teaching and learning practices and expectations in U.S. higher education.
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...It, however, broaches the
larger question of whether ITAs
even constitute a group where
group members share similar
backgrounds, experiences and
concerns and whether general
ITA training manuals are
therefore feasible. |
After all, there is not one way of how Americans think about teaching in higher education, and, clearly, being a native speaker of English alone does not guarantee good teaching practices. Communicate introduces language skills, cultural awareness, and teaching strategies as interrelated key components to ITA
development but ultimately privileges concerns about language barriers
and cultural difference over pedagogy. Drills to improve |
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intonation and paraphrasing are threaded through
the chapters.
The appendix of the book offers a set of discipline-specific terms for the natural and social sciences, not the humanities. All of this paired with the photographs of ITAs selected for the book strongly suggests that the authors, without acknowledging so, imagine ITAs as a rather homogenous group. Communicate is therefore only selectively useful. It, however, broaches the larger question of whether ITAs even constitute a group where group members share similar backgrounds, experiences and concerns and whether general ITA training manuals are therefore feasible Communicate: Strategies for International
Teaching Assistants, by Janice
A. Smith, Colleen M. Meyers, Amy
J. Burkhalter. Paperback: 256 pages. Publisher: Waveland Pr Inc. Language: English.
ISBN-10: 1577665309.
ISBN-13: 978-1577665304.
Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.4 x 0.8 inches . $27.95 |