Letter to the Reader
Hello friends,
Congratulations on your Teaching Fellowship contract! We’re excited to share this document with you.
As recent Teaching Fellows ourselves, we know that these opportunities are exciting and valuable. We’ve also experienced the stress and uncertainty that accompanies first-time instruction. In the lead up to our Teaching Fellowship contracts in Fall 2020, we connected with one another (rather spontaneously) to exchange drafts of our syllabi and discuss format options for the first full term of remote learning. We soon established an informal but regular practice of Teams chats and video calls in which we’d exchange teaching ideas, collaboratively demystify administrative procedures, and offer perspective on each other’s doubts or challenges. When our teaching terms ended, we knew we’d accumulated ideas and experience that could help future Teaching Fellows. We also felt like we could, and should, share that advice in a way that continued the practice of mutual care and mentorship we had found so valuable.
As a result, then, we offer this document not as a checklist, handbook, or reference (though we do allude to such things, as needed!), but as a record of what past Teaching Fellows have considered, talked about, worried about, felt, and discovered throughout their first teaching terms. One of our main goals has been to share our experiences in a way that demystifies the actual, nitty gritty stuff of running a course. The hidden curriculum of departmental and institutional pedagogical procedures is, by definition, too often unspoken and/or assumed to be learnable only through trial and error. We’ve aimed to counter those assumptions, and to pull together a resource genre that combines the interpersonal qualities of a community of practice with the informative features of a reference document (but one that sheds associations of efficient, straightforward procedure). We also hope that, as a thing that is circulated to incoming Teaching Fellows each year, this document can help to foster community, care, and advice-sharing practices.
It is with these aims in mind that we call this document Teaching Fellow Dialogues. The sections below are formatted as dialogues, which try to capture what we did, felt, and thought about, and what we would do differently in future. You’ll also notice occasional remarks from another teaching fellow, the amazing Barbara Ferguson, who kindly offered some perspectives on teaching 2RW6B. We hope this process will continue so that—alongside some practical notes about how things like textbook ordering and exam requests ‘work’ within our particular institution—the tone of this document remains non-prescriptive. Our teaching, learning, and working experiences are tied to our positionalities, as white settlers (Emily VH and Emily S) and as a disabled scholar (Emily S); the work of fostering accessible and anti-oppressive classrooms (for students and instructors) requires that the perspectives we provide here be expanded and revised. We also recognize that our own Teaching Fellowships in large, cultural studies-based courses may not always resonate with those teaching smaller seminars or literature-based courses. A process of ongoing contributions can fill out these dialogues with multiple intersectional perspectives and areas of expertise, as well as with practical updates to McMaster-specific processes.
While the mechanics of this cumulative process have yet to be worked out (specifically in ways that adequately compensate for graduate student labour!) in the meantime we welcome you to email us with any questions or concerns about this version of Teaching Fellow Dialogues. We also invite you to reach out to us on Teams, to chat about … anything. Such informal connections have been at the centre of our Teaching Fellowship experiences, and we warmly welcome you to join us!
Cheers,
Emily Scherzinger
Emily Goodwin
