“Interning” as a teaching assistant

Let me throw out a (ahem) hypothetical situation. . .

Say (again, just for the sake of this entirely hypothetical situation) that this week I took over the department’s internship program.  Pretend I have the power to approve or reject any internship that would earn a student academic credit from the history department.

Say a Master’s student contacts me and says she wants to “do an internship in” a colleague’s large-enrollment class.  By which she means basically be a TA, do grading, etc.  (We don’t have Ph.D. students, nor do we have standard TAships; grad students pretty much just work as readers/graders in my department, and we only have a handful of those positions each year.)

The student would not, I imagine, be paid for this “internship.”  In fact, she’d be paying for the internship credits.

My questions:

  • Should students “pay to play” as TAs?*
  • What does the willingness of both professor and student to set up this “internship” say about the present and future of our department, especially considering many prospective grad students already turn us down for schools with better offers?
  • Is this really a history internship?  That is–is this historical practice?  Would such an internship be better run through the education department? If so, should we be letting other departments oversee internships in our classrooms?
  • Should an M.A. student earn graduate-level academic credit for grading papers?
  • If the student has done this same “internship” before, should the student be able to repeat it for academic credit?
  • If it came out that this internship-supervising professor is on the student’s thesis committee, and has done this before, and has worked this same student way beyond the internship’s allotted hours, what would you do when the student contacted you for internship approval?  (Remember–you’re a very junior professor.  Imagine, too, that you’ve talked with other colleagues about this, and they’re divided about this internship’s appropriateness.)
  • What if, hypothetically speaking, it emerged that these large-enrollment classes supported by “interning” TAs allowed all the tenure-line folks in the department to teach fewer classes each year?  Would that affect how you approached your colleagues, if you were going to do so?

Your (hypothetical) thoughts?

 

*I think you know my answer to this question. After all, I received medical and dental insurance, tuition/fee remission, and a salary as a TA at both institutions where I was a graduate student.  Still, I’d like to hear your opinion.

Comments

  1. This might be surprising coming from me, but I think you should consider her application based on whether she can make an argument that clearly outlines what she will be learning. (I don’t know what the application process is, but the student and/or supervisor should have to explain something about what the student will be learning.) This is all assuming that there is no union representing teaching assistants/graduate workers at your university. Assisting a professor with a class could be a learning experience, especially if the professor actually helps the grad student learn how to go about tasks. Teaching classes and grading papers is something that historians do. Having experience as a teaching assistant might help this student if they decide to apply to PhD programs elsewhere or if they want to teach history at a community college. (I actually had internship credits as an undergrad for leading Intro. Chemistry Labs.) However, it seems to me that there is less justification for a student to repeat this “internship” more than once. What would she be learning that she didn’t learn the first time? Wouldn’t she learn more by interning somewhere else? Evaluating “teaching internships” in this way would be a compromise that wouldn’t totally reject the practice, but would hopefully keep it focused on the purpose of internships, student learning.

  2. I hate the idea of pay to play at an MA program.

    Is the grading thing a paid position? If so, then an internship shouldn’t do the same. If, on the other hand, the intern will get a chance to learn about making up a syllabus, making assignments, giving a lecture or leading some discussions, and so on (NOT grading, since that’s a paid position), then I can see that a one time internship doing this could benefit a student who is planning to go on to a PhD program or to teach at a community college. It shouldn’t happen twice, though. (In other words, if it’s a real learning experience for the student rather than a way to pass work off.)

    I would use the idea that an internship is supposed to provide one with an opportunity to learn something different or in different ways, esp stuff not available in classes to argue that it can’t be done twice, because the student wouldn’t be learning as much.

    I can see the temptation, but make the TA ships paid if you’re going to do that to reduce teaching loads.

  3. in short, no.

    My first reaction is that the situation does not in any constitute an “internship.” Secondly, it does constitute an unpaid t.a.-ship which seems bogus precedent. Thirdly, it doesn’t deserve academic credit, which is why T.A.’s get money not credit :)

    p.s. congrats on the omnipotence, at least as far as internships are concerned. I actually love supervising internships :)

  4. My instincts are with FeMOMhist but I wanted to add that TAs get LOW salaries because it is considered part of their training. Also, this is the reason some universities have used to block TAs from forming unions (i.e. they are students/trainees not employees).

    That said, I think unpaid internships in general are a bad idea. Though academic credit is a form of payment, I’m not sure how you determine the level of that credit for something like this.