About the blog
Welcome to my still emerging and evolving Political Science Teaching Assistant blog. The blog tab will contain reflections on my experiences as a teacher, from my first classes as a TA to my current experiences as a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia. But this is also a website that I hope will function as a place where prospective, new, and returning TAs, or anyone with an interest in being the best possible teacher, can listen to and share experiences, learn about the wide range of TA resources available at the departmental and university level, and gain insights into how to succeed as a TA.
This site is focused primarily on tips around best practices in teaching and does not purport to be a one-stop location for all things TA-related. There are links to resources for issues pertaining to contract, tracking and reporting hours, payment information, and so forth, but the primary intention of this site is to provide mentorship for, and nurture a community of practice among, TAs. This site is not officially connected to the department of political science website, but is consistent with its expectations and practices around TAships, and builds on the formal training sessions run by myself, my colleagues Jen Peterson and Allen Sens, and our senior TA co-coordinators Alison James and Justin Alger. Information about these, as well as ongoing and upcoming sessions, is included under the TA Training tab. The department also has a very useful “Teaching Assistant Guide” and the full text of this document is included under the Resources tab.
The motivation to build this site derives from: 1. my desire to share knowledge gained as an instructor in the educational leadership stream, and; 2. the reality that new TAs can find themselves presented with a bewildering array of resources, lengthy guidelines, and forms they have little time to read, and no context or experience on the basis of which to decide which of these resources will be most useful. I have undertaken to distill these resources and the department’s official TA guide into a condensed, user-friendly, efficient format informed by my own experiences and delivered primarily in narrative form.
Please feel free to leave comments pertaining to how your experience with the site has impacted your teaching and/or ways it can be improved. This is a work in progress that will evolve in accordance with teaching issues, concerns, and practices that you want to address and share.
About the blogger
My name is Robert Crawford and I am a member of the The Department of Political Science and the Arts One Program at UBC. I am classified as a “teaching stream” Instructor which means that, while I am an active publisher and researcher, my primary responsibilities are in the area of educational leadership. In Political Science I teach courses in International Relations and International Political Economy. Arts One is a first-year, team-taught, mutltidisciplinary program where I first taught in 1995, and where I continue as the longest standing core member of its teaching faculty. My teaching in Arts One tends to be concentrated in the area of what Political Scientists would call Political Philosophy. But I have designed course themes and reading lists that go well beyond this designation, and some of my recent lectures include Shakespeare, Sophocles, Dostoevsky, Jozef Conrad, William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Blake, and Arthur Miller.