Teaching Cultures: Teaching Orientations, Rewards and Social-Political Influences

For decades, scholars have studied the experiences of early childhood educators, schoolteachers, student teachers, professors, and so on. However, the experiences of teaching assistants (TAs) have largely been under-explored. By TAs, I mean graduate students who work part-time as educators, assisting undergraduate courses. In this research, I interview [N = 17] current graduate students at a university in southern Ontario, Canada, about their recent experiences working as TAs on campus. The purpose of this interviewing is to gain insight into what teaching activities TAs do, how and why, and how their broad commitments to environmental/sustainability education impact their teaching. From analyzing interview data, drawing on principles of grounded theory, I find my interview data supports, extends, and refutes how Lortie (2002) and followers (i.e., Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009) depict teaching cultures. Discussions of teaching cultures are situated in broader conversations of neoliberalism and sustainability. Research results are arranged in a didactic model, to help TAs, along with a broader audience of educational stakeholders, make more informed teaching decisions.