Academics in the making

Insights into the role of Graduate Teaching Assistants in Swedish Higher Education

Abstract

Acting as a teaching assistant constitutes a significant part of the training of doctoral students and is often the first step in an academic career. The experience as teaching assistant can be thus viewed as a formative experience for every academic. Despite its importance, the literature describing the teaching assistant's role and her/his relation to the students is sparse. In our survey we are exploring the challenges of being a teaching assistant, by looking both at the teaching assistants place in the academia and her/his relation to the students. We are looking at the regulations around this role, explore how students and teaching assistants view their interactions, which are the challenges of dealing with today's diverse classrooms
and what is the training they get to enable them to perform in their career as a teacher.