Self-Advocacy and Negotiation Strategies for TAs

Event Date & Time

Event Description

Advocating for yourself and others as a Teaching Assistant (TA) can be uncomfortable. There are power dynamics between you, your department, your students and your instructors that can sometimes be hard to navigate. Our aim for this session is to help TAs learn effective self-advocacy strategies that will support their overall wellbeing. We will do this by first reviewing some common problems that affect TA wellbeing at UBC. Next we will talk about why it is important to attend to TA wellness and how TAs can advocate for themselves at work. We will do this by reviewing TA rights (according to CUPE 2278) and clarifying different employment duties. Building on this, we will discuss different strategies TAs can use to advocate for themselves and to develop self-care strategies around challenging situations related to their employment.

Register and attend this workshop in order to complete the following theme(s):

• TA Wellness 

Facilitators:

• Laura Bulk, Graduate Student Facilitator, CTLT
• Colin Dring, Graduate Student Facilitator, CTLT
• Nicole Malette, PhD Candidate, Sociology Department

TA Institute

The TA Institute is open to any Graduate Student who is interested in teaching or TAing, and includes sessions on Teaching and Learning Theory, Scholarship, Classroom Strategies, Campus Climate, and Lesson Design. If you have interest in becoming a better TA, or get a head start preparing for teaching in your career, sign up for one or more of these 2 hour, interactive workshops.

This year, workshops in the TA institute are organized into 5 themes, and if you complete 3 workshops in a theme, and do the related pre & post institute online module, you are eligible for a letter of completion that you can include in your Teaching Portfolio and C.V. These letters will include a brief description of any themes that you completed, and how the work you did in those themes supports your development as a teacher.

The themes are:

• Teaching Skills
• TA Wellness
• Teaching and Learning Spaces
• Experiential Learning
• Teaching with Technology