Tim Chandler
"In designing these programs, my colleagues and I wanted to teach graduate students at Concordia about their union and the importance of labour issues in academic work."
My name is Tim Chandler, and I am a third-year PhD student in the Art History Department at Concordia. Since starting at the university, I have also been a member of the Delegate’s Council at the Teaching and Research Assistants of Concordia (TRAC) Union. The project I submitted to the Experiential Learning Office this year was designed to help a team of TRAC Delegates, which I am part of, deliver training programs to Teaching and Research Assistants at Concordia.
My colleagues and I started to develop this idea this past winter because we felt that as graduate students, we are often just dropped into our positions at the school and expected to pick up the specifics on the fly. It can often be stressful because, in addition to learning how to teach, grade, and interact with students, we are also learning the ins and outs of working at a huge institution. My team members and I had a wealth of experience as TAs and RAs at Concordia, so we wanted to pass that on to new graduate students and help them as they began their careers in academia.
Even though we would have loved to have hosted the programs in person, and we plan to do that in the future, we ultimately decided to host these sessions over Zoom because that still seemed to be what most graduate students were most comfortable with during the Winter 2022 term. The funding from the Experiential Learning Office allowed us to treat the training sessions like they were our job and to put in the effort required to make them look professional. Still, we also ensured that the sessions were a little informal, lighthearted, and fun for everyone involved. We were students doing the activities together, so it was important that all the participants knew we were all coming to this experience as equals rather than us leading them through a lecture.
The quality of our presentations then led to further opportunities, and GradProSkills reached out to have us deliver the programs through them. Thanks to this, we were able to reach a much wider base of students, helping both them and us. Many of the students who attended our sessions had not yet worked as Teaching or Research Assistants, so we were glad to see that we were reaching our target audience and giving new graduate students important information and tangible skills for when they begin their first academic jobs. It was also helpful because it broadened our views. My two colleagues work in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and I work in the Faculty of Fine Arts, which means that our experiences were tailored to Teaching and Research Assistantships in those specific faculties. So, by delivering these programs, we met and spoke with students from all over the university and learned what it is like to research and teach in other departments and faculties and what we all share as graduate students at the school.
Throughout these programs, I used my teaching and presentation skills. Each of us had begun to develop these skills during our TAships, and it was helpful to make even more use of them here. Even though presenting a workshop on pedagogy and university employee rights is much different from teaching first-year students about the Sistine Ceiling, there were definitely parallels between the two. We had to challenge ourselves to adapt our skills to a new context. After all, rather than teaching students about course material, we were trying to teach more advanced students in a professional development program.
In designing these programs, my colleagues and I wanted to teach graduate students at Concordia about their union and the importance of labour issues in academic work. This required us to develop our skills as organizers to incorporate labour relations into a professional development program. Working with TRAC has been our first experience doing this sort of organizing, and it was helpful to have support and insight from the union along the way to guide us in designing the programs.
The Experiential Learning Grant allowed me to deliver these TRAC programs, which I not only saw as something I was getting to do but as something I was doing for others. Now, as I continue my path as a PhD student, I have been taking moments along the way to think about how these programs have put me in touch with students from all over the school (and the world!), helped me contribute to my community of students, and given me essential skills and knowledge about working in academia.
This article was written by Timothy Chandler and edited by Juan Espana.
