2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work-in-Progress: Unpacking Graduate Teaching Assistants’ (GTAs) Taught Practice — Exploring Training through Decisional Capital

Presented at Chemical Engineering Division (ChED) Technical Session 3: Work-in-Progress Part 1

High quality teaching in chemical engineering is often supported by graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) who have always been at the forefront of this endeavour. They often contribute to lectures, labs, academic tutorials and more occasionally get involved with assessment, feedback and learning design. Therefore, it is important that we understand how GTAs can develop their practice as professional educators – for the time they are employed in these roles and better support them. Decisional capital is a useful lens through which to appreciate the mechanisms that help GTAs make decisions and choices about their teaching. As such, GTAs were invited to complete online surveys in which they were asked questions about their levels of experience, training, and motivation to provide us with insights on how they developed their taught practice. Furthermore, a few GTAs contributed further insights. From an ongoing analysis of our findings, we are in the preliminary stages of developing appropriate support mechanisms for our GTAs which build on aspects of decisional capital, namely mentoring and evaluation. In this paper we start identifying what meaningful mentoring, and deep-rooted and critical evaluation consist of.

Authors

Dr. Deesha Chadha Imperial College London [biography]

I currently work as a senior teaching fellow in the department of chemical engineering at Imperial College London having previously worked in academic development for a number of years at King's College London
Dr. Umang Vinubhai Shah Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, South Kensington, London SW7 2AZ [biography]

Umang received his Masters in Chemical Engineering from Gujarat University, India and worked as a Lecturer in Chemical Engineering at L.D. College of Engineering for 5 years before pursuing a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London. Umang has developed surface preferential approaches for nucleation and crystallisation of biological and complex organic molecules. More recently, he has worked as a Research Associate investigating the role of surface properties on particle-particle interaction and developed approaches for decoupling contribution of different surface attributes on powder cohesion. In 2012, as recognition to his contributions to Undergraduate laboratory teaching, he was been nominated for the Graduate Teaching Assistant Awards for the Faculty of Engineering. Umang currently has a role in leading the operation and innovation of the teaching laboratories and he manages Graduate Teaching Assistants for the Department of Chemical Engineering.

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