�A long-lasting positive experience� from a Short-term Commitment: The Power of the WAC TA Fellow Role for Disciplinary TAs

Abstract

While teaching assistants (TAs) often play a crucial role in teaching writ-ing-intensive courses and often go on into faculty careers, a relatively small body of research has interrogated the ways that WAC/WID programs may effectively train and support disciplinary TAs. In this essay, we draw on surveys and interviews with former WAC TA Fellows—disciplinary TAs who helped to lead training for new TAs teaching writing-intensive courses at a large research university. We offer this close analysis of the WAC TA Fellow role as one relatively short-term and small-scale model with, we find, significant and ongoing benefits for supporting disciplinary TAs as emerging professionals and as future WAC allies. first provide an overview of the WAC TA Fellow program that we are studying in this essay; we then review literature from WAC and from the scholarship of teaching and learning regarding the needs and options for TA training related to pedagogy—revealing gaps around empirical evidence for the effectiveness of various training models and a growing interest in ways to engage TAs in leadership roles around teaching training. We then lay out our survey and interview-based research designed to contribute to these knowledge gaps. Finally, we analyze those survey and interview responses (which form a rich data set: thirty-three former TAs