Letter to the Reader of Version 2
Dear readers,
Thank you for your interest in Teaching Fellow Dialogues (Version 2)! With the support of the Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation, and Excellence in Teach, we are excited to share this document with a wider audience across (and perhaps beyond!) the McMaster University campus. With that expanded audience in mind, we’d like to briefly contextualize this resource, its original intended audience, and our hopes for its utility and application.
We developed this resource in the semesters following our first Teaching Fellowships–which we held in Fall 2020, under remote learning conditions–in our home department of English & Cultural Studies. We knew that our department regularly hired Teaching Fellows from the senior cohorts of PhD candidates like us, and that therefore we were writing with our immediate peers (and erstwhile office mates) in mind. Our ambition for this resource, as we explained in our letter to those peers in Version 1 of Dialogues, has been to foster forms of mutual mentorship among first-time graduate instructors, to keep care at the centre of that community, and to set aside the abstract language of a ‘resource’ in favour of the open, reflexive, and ongoing modality of a ‘dialogue.’
As a result of these aims and intended audience, this document is tied to the pedagogical content, course structures, and institutional experiences of our home department. However, we sincerely hope that Teaching Fellow Dialogues resonates with graduate student instructors in other units, as well as with folks in a variety of pedagogical roles. Most if not all of the topics we discuss here–such as developing a syllabus, working with TAs, preparing lectures, and so on–will apply to a wide range of post-secondary contexts. Most importantly, we hope that this document encourages you to cultivate community within, and develop pedagogical supports for, graduate student Teaching Fellows in your own immediate communities. To that end, we are delighted to extend these Dialogues to a wider audience.
Warmly,
Emily Scherzinger
Emily Goodwin
