Graduate Programs
Assistant Instructorships and Teaching Assistantships
The Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, is highly committed to the professional development of its graduate instructors. During their career at UT, these instructors are thoroughly prepared to teach lower-division language courses, and may also apply to teach content courses as well.
Due to Texas legislation, graduate instructors working towards their masters’ degrees work as teaching assistants, apprentices for the assistant instructors (doctoral students). This is a unique opportunity for graduate instructors to learn from experienced teachers and explore their classroom personae at leisure while they are also adjusting to the demands of their advanced studies.
In order to prepare teaching assistants and assistant instructors for lower division language teaching, an intensive, week-long orientation program – run by the language program coordinator with presentations by advanced graduate instructors – introduces the objectives of the UT German language program and provides hands-on training in lesson planning, materials development and classroom management. During the academic year, bi-weekly coordination meetings (in which groups of instructors of each level of language teaching collaboratively design the content and grading of exams and discuss issues related to language teaching) ensure that the language program is coherent and allow the graduate instructors to have an active and regular voice in its administration.
Qualified graduate instructors may also serve as course coordinators (in charge of a level of instruction for one or two semesters), which provides added experience in syllabus design, TA supervision, test development and program administration.
UT offers further unique pedagogical experience to its assistant instructors (doctoral students). AIs are very much encouraged to design content courses that relate to any area within Germanic studies either for a freshman, general education audience or for fourth-semester German language students. In either case, the instructors work closely with a faculty mentor to finalize the plans for the course (e.g., design the syllabus, select the appropriate texts, prepare lectures or presentations, classroom activities, etc.). This faculty mentor also comes and visits the graduate instructor while the course is being offered, in part to offer suggestions for improvement, and in part to be able to address the AI’s teaching in subsequent recommendation letters, which will further distinguish UTs AIs from those at other institutions who do not have the opportunity to teach their own content courses. As an alternative to submitting ideas for courses that the AI designs, several syllabi for courses that have been successfully taught before are also readily available for interested AIs (e.g., Movies Go To War, Bad Blood, Bad Boy Brecht, History of American and European Detective Fiction, Texas-German Dialects, etc.).
The faculty’s support for our graduate instructors is not limited to preparing them to teach in our program. Faculty mentors continue to work with the AIs and TAs when they enter the job market, helping them compile strong teaching dossiers, and prepare model lessons for on-campus interviews. These mentoring relationships often extend beyond the students’ graduate years, as the Department’s faculty members share their expertise and guidance even after the candidates begin their independent teaching careers elsewhere.