About the Conference

CONFERENCE OBJECTIVES

In graduate school, students must navigate a path between their work as emerging scholars and the expectations associated with becoming a practicing professional, whether within or beyond academe. While expectations for completing degree requirements may be made clear to students in a graduate program, expectations for working beyond the degree are often less successfully communicated. Students are not always fully prepared for the range of  responsibilities associated with an academic position. They may lack the interpersonal and project management skills necessary to initiate and oversee research projects or contribute effectively to course planning or program reviews. They may not have had sufficient opportunities to learn about and practice teaching in their discipline. Graduates can at times face challenges in the non-academic workplace as well, where expectations for effective communication and decision-making are high.  Graduate students therefore experience a tension between the idealized role of the intellectual or researcher and the reality of the expectations associated with a professional workplace. Navigating Your PATH will bring together faculty members, administrators, educational developers, librarians, student support staff, professionals, and most importantly, students from all over Canada, the United States and points beyond to examine the latest research and practices in graduate student development and Teaching Assistant (TA) training. In discussing how we prepare graduate students for teaching, curriculum planning, research, publishing, grant-seeking, report-writing, public speaking, community work, etc., we hope to clarify for graduate students (and those who work to support them) the paths that lie ahead.

TIMELINESS OF CONFERENCE

Navigating Your PATH represents a culmination of growing interest in Canada in the support and development of professional skills in graduate students, including the training provided to TAs. Several Canadian institutions participate regularly in annual higher education conferences where the efficacy of TA training is discussed, although never in enough depth. Over the past decade, there has been interest at the national level in this topic. The Canadian Association for Graduate Studies (CAGS) supported a conference on innovation in graduate education in 2005 and the Tri-Council national research agencies (NSERC, SSHRC, CIHR) together with CAGS and the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) sponsored a gathering of academics and professionals in Ottawa in 2007 to discuss the development of professional skills in graduate students.  In addition to this growing national interest in TA and graduate student development, Navigating Your PATH hopes to build on the success of 20 years of conferences in the United States that have focused on graduate teaching assistant training and the development of graduate students as “future faculty”. No such national conference focusing on the combination of TA training and skills development in graduate students has ever taken place in Canada.This conference therefore seeks to build connections across Canada and between Canada and the United States.