University officials are concerned “about [the] difficulties they experience in finding new
Ph.D.s who are prepared to begin teaching”(Dolan 1997). Governments, parents, and students
are also concerned about professors and teaching because universities are not meeting the
expectations of society (Bartlett 2003; Bomotti 1994; Duderstadt 2001; Tice 1998). Given these
concerns about education, one would expect that new graduate students receive more attention to
their development as instructors. Though the future of the political science discipline belongs to
graduate students, there is a serious gap in explaining how student instructors approach the
classroom and how they prepare to become future faculty members. Current research only asks if
universities have opportunities or programs that focus on teacher training, and how these
programs function. Few studies address what graduate students actually learn in teacher training
courses, or more importantly, how graduate instructors implement their knowledge of teaching in
their classrooms. It is the goal of this research to evaluate graduate students’ knowledge by
examining the pedagogy employed in the classroom.
Though the discipline wants to produce better instructors, there is almost no literature
systematically studying the teaching methods employed by graduate student instructors. The
literature overlooks the inner workings of the classroom as a viable arena for scholarship. This is
the result of four specific reasons: the sanctity of the classroom, the “black box”
approaches to
the inner workings of the class, the “cultural of silence,” and a general lack of concern for
rigorous reviews of graduate instructor courses. By breaking the sanctity, entering the box, and
talking to graduate instructors, our research discovers that graduate instructors want to move in
dynamic directions with their teaching, yet there remains a predominance of lecturing techniques
in the classroom.
In the literature review, we demonstrate that though academia wants better teachers, there
are no evaluations of the knowledge or use of pedagogical methods within the classroom. We
-2-
Convention