Graduate Student Teaching Fellows Lost in Translation

Yundan Pi admits that she was not prepared for her duties as a teaching fellow.

Pi, a third-year graduate student in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, served as a teaching fellow for an advanced course in her department last spring, but she says she did not feel completely comfortable communicating with her students.

“Sometimes, I just didn’t do well,” Pi says, adding that she often had trouble responding to her students’ questions. “I was so nervous.”

Pi, who has lived in America for seven years, has had to acclimate herself to the American classroom after experiencing a very different pedagogical environment in China. She had not been prepared to see students eat in the classroom, and she was unfamiliar with the concept of extracurricular commitments.

So when the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning extended a pilot pedagogy course this spring targeted at graduate students who are non-native English speakers, Pi says she pounced on the “wonderful opportunity.”

Since 2007, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has expanded its collaboration with the Bok Center—which focuses on undergraduate teaching—on a series of initiatives that seek to combat the language barrier between TFs and students in the classroom.

Last fall, the Bok Center began a pilot program called “Oral Communications Skills Course For International TFs.” The students—who hail predominantly from East Asia and study the physical sciences—are joined by two undergraduates in a unique environment that exposes the graduate students to American culture and the Harvard classroom.

THE LANGUAGE BARRIER

William N. Forster ’13, one of the undergraduates who assist the non-native speakers in the new course, recalls his foreign Life Science 1a teaching fellow’s struggle with communicating the basic concepts of biology.

“It made it not worth going to class,” Forster says.

Nearly one third of all students at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are foreign. Each year, there are around 230 incoming international students, and not all of them can speak perfect English. But most of them are requested to lead a section for an undergraduate course by their second or third year in school, according to GSAS Dean for Student Affairs Garth O. McCavana.

The Bok Center has offered pedagogy courses for graduate student instructors since its establishment in 1975. Departments that offer similar courses for their own graduate students will often collaborate with the center, says Bok Center Associate Director Virginia Maurer.

But until 2007, there existed no standard method of screening the language skills of foreign TFs. Departments used their own methods of preparing section leaders, ranging from courses that count for credit to a simple day-long workshop at the Bok Center, according to Assistant Dean of the College Logan S. McCarty.

“Graduate students would be asked to teach who may not have had the language skills needed to be successful in the classroom,” McCarty says. “And that doesn’t benefit anyone.”

In 2007, a GSAS committee’s recommendations ordered that all non-native English speaking graduate students be screened for competency in reading and speaking English—whether they anticipated teaching undergraduates or not.

McCarty—who has worked in the Office of Undergraduate Education since 2007—says he has noticed a decrease in undergraduate complaints about their TFs’ language skills, and a rise in CUE guide scores for foreign TFs.

But the improvement in evaluations have coincided with an array of workshops and classes offered by the Bok Center—including this year’s pilot program.

“The Bok Center’s focus on understanding the American classroom is crucial,” McCarty says about continued support for TFs’ interactions with undergraduates.

TEACHING THE TEACHERS

The Bok Center has recently reemphasized its focus on acclimating the foreign TF through the new semester-long course that utilizes undergraduate perspectives to help graduate students better understand the Harvard classroom.

The success of the eight-person class in the fall semester compelled the Bok Center to offer a second section in the spring. The Center accepted 16 of the 40 graduate students who applied for a spot in the class.

“There’s a need and a desire for this kind of thing,” says Maurer, who hopes the program will continue next semester.

To foster better communication with undergraduates, graduate students meet weekly with the College students working in the course for informal discussion.

In the classroom, eight GSAS students sit with two undergraduates and discuss cultural issues and current events, says course head Pamela Pollock, who is working on a dissertation about foreign students’ experiences in the American graduate school system.

“It’s really hard to build small talk if you don’t have the cultural base to know what’s going on,” Pollock says.

Last week, for example, students were asked to read an article about the intensity of the American college process. The exercise provided students the basic tools to engage in conversation both inside and outside the classroom, according to Pollock.

The course is not designed as a structural language course—such as an ESL class—but rather seeks to help graduate students practice “oral communication” across cultural barriers, Maurer says.

At Harvard, foreign TFs face pedagogical and cultural differences that do not always stem from insufficient language skills, Maurer says.

She describes one teaching fellow for Social Analysis 10—the popular introductory economics course commonly known as Ec 10—who received subpar CUE guide scores and complaints about his language skills from students in his section.

When Maurer began working with the individual, she reviewed a film of one of his classes and found that language was not the problem—the TF was teaching at a level too high for the students, she says.

“[The students] pegged it as being his language because he had an accent,” Maurer says.

BRIDGING CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

By seeking to improve the teaching skills of foreign TFs, the Bok Center course benefits both the graduate students—many of whom may later assume teaching posts—and their undergraduate students, Pollock says.

“That’s what I love about my job,” she says. “It’s a win-win for everyone.”

With the Bok Center course, Pi receives the undergraduate input she says is important for her to understand what College students expect in the classroom.

Forster—whose experience in Life Sci 1a provided some of the incentive to help out in the new course—meets weekly with each of his four graduate student partners to go over class work and engage them in general conversation.

He says that he has learned to identify the standard weak spots: vocabulary is not crucial, and he opts to focus on word stress and sentence fluency.

And like any rigorous teacher, Forster complains that his graduate students don’t practice enough outside of class.

“Every week, for some of them, is like starting new,” he says.

—Staff writer Noah S. Rayman can be reached at nrayman@fas.harvard.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: April 14, 2010

An earlier version of the Apr. 14 news article "Graduate Student Teaching Fellows Lost in Translation" incorrectly suggested that there is a total of 230 international students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In fact, the 230 figure refers to the approximate number of incoming international students each year.