Valuing the Everyday: A Verbal Study in GTA Response to Pre-Designed Curriculum

Abstract

“Valuing the Everyday: A Verbal Study in GTA Response to Pre-Designed Curriculum” culminates in a verbal understanding of how four graduate teaching associates at the University of Arizona used and responded to pre-designed courses (PDC) and may suggest ways to structure training or learning management systems (LMS) themselves to better accommodate and scaffold new instructors’ pedagogy. “Verbal” refers to the grammatical unit of speech “verb.” An analysis of verbs emphasizes the experiences of GTAs interacting with pre-designed curriculum, a site of possible professional development support. After conducting four interviews with GTAs, the interview transcripts went through a multi-step in-vivo coding process which uncovered eight insightful verb categories to make sense of actions-as-response to pre-designed courses: philosophy, experience [passive], schematic, moment, outcome, absence, inefficacy, and efficacy. One sharable finding includes a need to compile modified, used, and created lessons from GTAs. There are already communities of practice who have open discussions and modifications to the PDCs, and those researchers could consider a purposeful compilation of GTA-generated lessons in conjunction with interview analysis. This compilation, from my study’s perspective, would yield a better understanding of GTAs’ efficacy regarding pre-designed curriculum; indeed, it would concretize the implementation of the different verbal categories as a method to analyze active, passive, and neutral PDC engagements.