The recent transition to online learning has negatively impacted many of us in higher education. We know that those who are currently teaching or preparing to teach online courses have encountered considerable challenges with the sudden switch to online platforms. These challenges are especially pressing for those who have had to take on additional childcare duties or other unexpected care work at home, work which disproportionately tends to be done by women (see here and here). However, we must also recognize the unique disadvantages and burdens that this transition has placed upon graduate student teachers. Graduate students are likely to be new to instruction in general, and newer to online teaching and learning management systems in particular, and they are much more likely to be teaching courses that they have never taught before. As a result of these realities, transferring to online-only instruction is likely to impose greater consequences on graduate students, beyond the increased workload that any given faculty member might experience with this transition. In addition to the course preparation we were already performing, we now have to perform many new tasks that were not specified in the contracts we signed at the beginning of term, and we can little afford to take on this unpaid labor, given our already precarious circumstances.
In light of these new challenges facing graduate student teachers, we offer the following recommendations. These recommendations are adapted from a broader set of recommendations proposed by The Graduate Student Council of the APA on how to support graduate students during the pandemic.
Financial Support for Lost Teaching Opportunities
When possible, departments should refrain from cancelling summer classes and other sources of funding for graduate students, such as diversity institutes or summer camps for high school students. These opportunities should be shifted online, if they can be, and if they must be canceled, then departments should ensure that graduate students are paid for (at minimum) the work on these courses and initiatives that they have already completed (such as designing new courses or completing application reviews for summer institutes).
Increasing Teaching Opportunities
When possible, departments should also advocate for more graduate student teaching opportunities and/or prioritize graduate students for teaching courses in future terms that would otherwise be given to more senior faculty who are generally less financially precarious.
Recognizing Additional Labor and Online Training
We strongly encourage departments to advocate for pay increases for graduate students who are currently leading online discussion sections or teaching their own online courses. Additionally, we call upon departments to provide (paid) training in their university’s online teaching and learning system. If financial support is impossible, then departments can at least provide support to graduate student teachers by advertising resources for online teaching (such as those found through the Philosophers Cocoon, and the online teaching forum on APA Connect).
Teaching Evaluations
We encourage departments to recognize and collaborate with their graduate students on a plan for how to use teaching evaluations from this semester in future hiring decisions. Student course evaluations are not fully reliable in the best circumstances and often disadvantage students from historically marginalized groups. It is important that graduate students are not penalized (e.g., in decisions about future course assignments or in teaching recommendation letters) for poor teaching evaluations during what is an incredibly challenging period for all instructors, but especially for those of us who are newer to teaching. However, if graduate students need teaching evaluations (for their teaching dossiers or job applications), then they should have the option to request that evaluation be collected.
International Students
Many international students are significantly limited in the amount of remote learning and online teaching they are permitted to do, and visa compliance often limits international students’ abilities to seek employment outside of their university. Many international students are facing a difficult decision. On the one hand, they can travel to their home country (if travel restrictions permit this) to be near loved ones and/or to be in a place where they have better living conditions and support, but they thereby run the risk of being unable to return to study and teach at their university if in-person instruction resumes. Or, on the other hand, they may decide not to travel to their home country, but they may then experience limited employment opportunities, increased financial hardships, and/or isolation from family and other support networks. It is vital that departments and universities support international students and make appropriate accommodations in order to ensure that they are able to complete their program on time. Departments should lobby universities to release international students from the residency requirement and protect students whose visa status is threatened by the shift to online teaching and other pandemic related disturbances.
Concluding Thoughts
We recognize that all departments are limited both in the financial means they have available to them and the power they have to put pressure on universities to allocate more funding and other forms of support to graduate students. Furthermore, it is imperative to acknowledge that departments are unequally able to implement these recommendations (as a result of differences in available funding at various institutions), and these differences are likely to exacerbate the difficulties that students from universities with less funding already face, even under normal circumstances. Thus, while we have outlined a number of recommendations that involve the increased funding of graduate student teachers, we have also suggested a number of other (non-financial) interventions that can be implemented at the department level to help meet the needs of graduate students and support their success in teaching during this incredibly difficult time.
Of course, these recommendations are not by any means exhaustive, and we want to emphasize that this discussion must continue to grow and evolve as new challenges and circumstances arise for graduate student teachers. We are in the midst of a global crisis, and higher education is in the process of undergoing many twists and turns in the days, months, and years to come. During these unprecedented times we call upon university leadership to seriously consider and take responsibility for the professional growth and success of its graduate students.
Arianna Falbo
Arianna Falbo is a PhD student at Brown University, where she is also pursuing a doctoral certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research is primarly in epistemology, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of language (and their various intersections), and she is currently working on projects on inquiry as well as epistemic oppression. Arianna is dedicated to making academic philosophy more inclusive and friendly. To this end, she has taught for Corrupt the Youth, an educational outreach program that brings philosophy to students from low-income backgrounds and Title 1 high schools. She also co-founded and helps to organize a MAP chapter at Brown, and this summer she is excited to serve as the graduate director for Brown’s Summer Immersion Program in Philosophy (SIPP).
Emma McClure
Emma McClure is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, they were inspired to write this post by conversations with fellow graduate students and early career scholars: Kayla Wiebe, Lisa McKeown, C. Dalrymple-Fraser, Jessica Wright, Mark Fortney, Joshua Brandt, Howard Williams, and her co-authors on the APA blog post where they originally raised these questions, Arianna Falbo and Heather Stewart.
