• Introduction

• Content of the Learning Community

• Structure of the Learning Community

• Rationale for the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Model

• Compatibility of Teaching and Learning Needs

• Recruitment and Selection of the Teaching Assistants

• Preparation of the Teaching Assistants

• Roles and Conflicts

• The Teaching Team

• Evaluating the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Model

• The Experiences of the Teaching Assistants

• The Pedagogic Value of the Model

• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 2000 by Kimberly Eby (keby1@gmu.edu) and Paula Gilbert (pgilbert@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

Violence is an issue that permeates contemporary American society in frightening proportions. Over the past two decades, local, state, and national preventive measures have been successfully launched to address this epidemic. These efforts alone, however, are not enough to make the American public feel secure when faced with the brutal incidents of violence that are reported so frequently in the media.  We were shocked at the school shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. We were numbed when we heard of the Los Angeles shootings at a Jewish Community Center and particularly horrified that young children had been targeted. We stared at our televisions in disbelief as the reports of the Atlanta gunman filtered in, not only because it was the second example of lethal workplace violence that week, but also because it is likely that this was the second time this particular man had murdered his own family. 

And while we have not had an example recently that has riveted the nation's attention the way the O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson case did, the problems of domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse continue to be reported at staggering rates. While we are shocked and enraged by these violent events, we simultaneously seek out and glorify incidences of violence in film, on television, in the newspapers, on news programs, and in the world of video games. Some Americans are indignant at the mere mention of gun control. How do we make sense of these events? How can we explain our conflicting yet apparent obsession with and abhorrence of violence? 

A sense of personal concern and responsibility to address these and other questions led to the creation of the learning community, Violence and Gender, at George Mason University's New Century College (NCC).  NCC is an interdisciplinary, student-centered college in which learning communities are team-taught by faculty of different disciplines. The term, "learning community," refers to an interdisciplinary, interactive class in which students take much responsibility for their own learning, often work in study groups, and usually perform some type of experiential learning to complement the academic context. 

The intent of this paper is to discuss our experiences in developing and implementing a model in which we supervised and mentored five undergraduates in their roles as teaching assistants (TAs). This was an extensive process that included exploring the feasibility of using undergraduates as TAs, recruiting, selecting, and preparing the TAs, and developing an organizational structure and teaching approaches for a productive and fruitful collaboration. 

We believe that understanding the intensity of this process is critical to informing your opinion of the final teaching and learning experiences. For this reason, we have structured this paper to describe those processes prior to sharing our assessment of the experience. We also believe that having knowledge of the learning community content and its structure is instructional, and we describe this information in the following section.

Next Section: "Content of the Learning Community"