A Transdisciplinary Approach to International Teaching Assistants

Download or read book A Transdisciplinary Approach to International Teaching Assistants written by Stephen Daniel Looney and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2019-09-26 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North American universities depend on international teaching assistants (ITAs) as a substantial part of the teaching labor force, which has led to the idea of an ‘ITA problem’, a deficiency model which is framed as a divergence between ITAs’ linguistic competence and undergraduates’ and their parents’ expectations. This outdated positioning of ITAs as deficient diminishes the invaluable role they play within the academy. This book argues instead for an approach to ITA which recognizes them as multilingual, skilled, migrant professionals who participate in and are discursively constructed through various participant frameworks, modalities and activities. The chapters in this volume offer state-of-the-art research into ITA using a variety of methods and approaches, and as such constitute a transdisciplinary perspective which argues for the importance of dialogue between research and practice.