Program Training & Professional Development

As a program, ICaP offers a number of professional development opportunities to its instructors. Being a program largely staffed by graduate students, the majority of thier professional development efforts are geared in that direction, but resources for professional development are available to all instructors.

The program faciliates or provides

• An anti-practicum course for GTAs
• Funding to attend professional conferences
• Graduate assistanship roles including an Assistant WPA, an Assessment Data Coordinator, and Practicum Mentors
• Informal mentoring with the WPA
• An open-acess collection of resources for teaching digital writing
• Teaching observations by anti-practicum instructors and graduate student mentors
• A Technology Mentor Program
• Workshops provided by the Tech Mentors

The sections below highlight 3 of these areas of professional development that are distinctive in ideation or implementation to the Purdue program.

Tech Mentors are graduate students who take on the role as Tech Mentor as their gradaute assistantship. Tech Mentors provide "pedagogy-oriented technology instruction." Former Tech Mentor Patrick Love describes the approach as "We're not teaching technology for technology's sake...I'd say we're always teaching it in this is something that you can integrate into your lesson."

Support for First-Year Graduate Students & Lecturers

Tech Mentors faciliate at least 8 sessions of ENGL 50500 (the practicum course), introducing techno-pedagogical approaches, strategies, and tools. They are also available for 1:1 consultations and maintain a website of resources that outline strategies and provide downloadable resources for use by ICaP instructors.

The program also provides development for the graduate student mentors themselves. Graduate students who provided maps on the Experiential Learning page of this exhibit indicated that participating in this program as mentors and engaging with the mentors beyond the first year was critical to thier development as teachers of digital writing.

Ongoing Support to Implement Curricular Changes

Tech mentoring was established to support faculty teaching in computer classrooms (a required part of ENGL 10600). Tech Mentor Patrick Love articulated that the rationale for the program was "we got these computer labs...and instructors really aren't sure what to do with computer lab day. Yes, we got the computers. Now what do we do with them? Because now we have this separate space that is different from our classrooms and we need to figure out and adapt our pedagogy to it."

Tech mentors continue to evolve with technology and the pedagogical support they provide extends beyond using just computers into teaching with social media, using the learning management system effectively, and best practices for teaching non-native English speakers, creating accesible materials, and dealing with intellectual property in a digital environment.

Ongoing Consultations and Support for the Department

According to WPA Bradley Dilger, "we encourage all people in the department to use [tech mentors], and not only for teaching composition, for whatever." He goes on to articulate that tech mentoring is a service provided for the entire department and anybody who wants to integrate digital media or writing into thier classroom can get help from the tech mentors.

ENGL 505: Teaching Introductory Composition

This course is for new graduate students, who are assigned 1 section of ENGL 10600, for each semester during thier first year. Graduate students in some programs teach 2 sections a term, but the load for ENGL 10600 is 1:1. In grduate students' first year, they are also enrolled in ENGL 505, which runs for 2 semesters. Each section is facilitated by a faculty mentor and a graduate student assistant mentor. 

Irwin (Bud) Weiser, who often teaches the course, describes the course's underlying goals. "The goals as I see them are essentially to provide support to instructors who a[re] new to what they do. It's not really a theory and research heavy course, there are not, at least the way I do the course, a lot of outside reading assignments. Their homework is essentially developing your syllabus and policy statement based on templates that we provide, becoming familiar with the textbook, reading student papers, and having conversations about student papers, participating in the two time per-week practicum sessions, one of which is I'm sure you know is technology, naturally conducted by graduate students."

He goes on to indicate the the rationale for this approach, rather than an approach that combines an introduction composition studies and the teaching practicum is that (1) there is an existing curriculum for introducing to students to composition theory and (2) new instructors have enough to do as new teachers and new students at a new institution.

ICaP makes its resources for teaching ENGL 10600 available to instructors within the program on its website and through a shared Google Drive.

Resources include an lengthy and detailed instructor manual, sample syllabi, sample assigment sheets, and samples activities.

It also produces a Student Guide to ICap to give students an overview of what to expect in the course and an Advisor's Guide to help advising staff place students into courses.

Below, find direct links to professional development materials used for this particular institution. Note, you can also find all professional development materials for all institutions in the resource repository by clicking here.