Teaching assistants (TAs) and the tutorials they lead are among the most important parts of undergraduate education. How much training TAs receive is therefore a significant deciding factor in how well the University of Toronto functions as a school, and some of the TAs themselves argue that they are not given nearly enough.
Graduate students at U of T are often offered enough funding to pay for their programs. Part of this funding package can come in the form of a position as a TA. First-year TAs go through just three hours of mandatory, paid training before being they begin their work. These three hours of learning generally focus on skills such as time management, tutorial management, and other important pedagogical skills, as well as grading. No paid training is available for TAs who start teaching a new course or start doing different kinds of TA work after their first year.
This means that a teaching assistant who has spent their first few years as a grading TA and is asked to do supplementary lectures or work as a tutorial leader must do so without any additional paid training.
“Not every graduate student is funded, but PhD programs are generally funded, and there is a minimum guaranteed funding. That funding is $15,000, plus tuition and fees,” explained Jaby Mathew, academics and funding commissioner of the University of Toronto Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) who is a teaching assistant himself: “Of that $15,000, a percentage of it comes from stipend, and a percentage of it comes from work. The work can be TA-ship or RA-ship.” Matthew went on to point out that the university effectively has the choice between making students work for some of their guaranteed money or simply paying the full sum.
With this in mind, it makes sense that the administration wishes to save as much money as possible on those positions. “The collective agreement between CUPE 3902 [Canadian Union of Public Employees], Unit 1, and the University of Toronto requires that TAs on their first contract at the University of Toronto receive three hours of paid training,” stated Sara Carpenter, acting assistant director of the Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation at U of T (CTSI). “That is the only centralized mechanism within the university for training. Departments may engage in additional training beyond that.”
The caveat is that while TAs can pursue additional training through the CTSI’s Teaching Assistant Training Program (TATP), or through the department that employs them, the university is not required to pay them during that time. Regardless, many teaching Assistants take advantage of these opportunities, spending time going to optional, unpaid TATP workshops, or simply observing more experienced TAs leading tutorials. “TAs do it because, particularly in the Faculty of Arts & Science, many of them want to get into teaching, so they want to acquire those skills,” noted Mathew. “They are doing it so it can help them in the future.”
Of course, for many graduate students, spending so many hours participating in unpaid training is not a realistic option. According to CUPE, the university has historically resisted remedying the situation. “Whenever we bargain with the university, we try to get more training. The university doesn’t want to guarantee that to us because it costs them money to train TAs — not only to develop the training programs to give us the resources we need to do well in the classroom, but also to pay the hourly rate to attend training,” stated Ryan Culpepper, internal liaison officer of CUPE 3902. “So they’re always resisting offering more training.” Despite this, change is possible in the future. CUPE 3902 and the university are currently working together in a committee to deal with issues regarding tutorials, and Culpepper believes it likely that their work will result in more paid training for TAs, as well as smaller tutorial sizes.
Cumbersomely large tutorials are another symptom of the university’s frugality with teaching assistants. As undergraduate enrollment increases, TAs are gradually being spread thinner, as they have to devote more time to marking larger numbers of assignments; conversely, they have less time to teach tutorials that have increasing numbers of students.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that teaching assistant contracts are for a set number of hours, meaning that if a TA runs out of hours because they need to grade more assignments or hold office hours for more students than the contract predicted, they may run out of hours they will be paid for their work.
