Teaching as part of the PhD: the Harvard experience

Abstract

I would like to start by thanking Dean Ray Spear, Margot Pearson, and John Clanchy for their warm hospitality during this, my first visit to Australia and to the ANU. I'm always aware when I lecture outside the United States that the problems we deal with may not be similar to those you face, and that the solutions we have come up with may not be applicable to conditions elsewhere. But I hope nevertheless that some of what I have to say will find resonance with you at a university where, as at Harvard, Ph.D. students are often simultaneously engaged in teaching and research. <P> Let me introduce my topic by giving you a little background about Harvard University and its graduate school. Then I'll say something about teaching by graduate students and the role of the Derek Bok Center in offering them training. Finally, l would like to raise two broader issues concerning the way graduate students learn and the responsibility the university has for fostering that learning. <P> What is our situation? Harvard University has approximately 6,000 undergraduates - fewer than the ANU - and 11,000 graduate students. That latter number looks high. However, most of those graduate students are in professional schools of law, medicine, and business. Actually, in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the number of graduate Ph.D. students is about 1,800, or a little less than a third the number of undergraduates. Of these 1,800, most will teach by the time they receive their degree. <P> A heavy use of graduate students in the teaching ranks is characteristic of most American research universities. At Harvard, graduate students have taught undergraduates on a regular basis for more than fifty years. In fact the current president of the university, Neil Rudenstine, himself tutored in Renaissance English literature when he was a graduate student in the Harvard English Department in the early 1960s. Teaching Fellows, as tutors are called at Harvard, depend on their teaching for a significant part of their income, just as the university depends on them to provide a skilled but relatively inexpensive source of labor. They perform three principal types of teaching: what you call tutorials and we call sections, attached to a large lecture course; what you call demonstrations and what we call laboratory supervisions; and finally what we call tutorials, on the Oxbridge model. In all these domains, Teaching Fellows make an essential contribution to the teaching life of the university. But although the tradition of graduate student teaching is well established, the practice of training those teachers is far more recent. Formerly, the way graduate students learned to teach, at least at Harvard, was trial and error, sink or swim. There were some disasters early in the semester, as tutors fumbled their way through tutorials and demonstrations. But common wisdom among the faculty held that graduate tutors gained experience by making mistakes. This approach was reinforced by a common assumption that what mattered in teaching was subject mastery. If you understood the material in a course, you could communicate it. Some tutors did in fact develop into good teachers over time; but it was hard on them, and especially hard on their students. Show more