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The Teaching Associate Archive

This archive serves as a central resource for teaching, professionalization, and research materials for graduate students in English at Syracuse University.  It is designed to provide practical advice, regulations and policies, and sample materials for the topics most relevant to graduate teaching associates.  

Navigating the archive is simple. The site is comprised of three major sections--Teaching, Professionalization, and Research.  Each section is further divided into subdivisions, with both general information, and items specific to your precise teaching assignment.  The menu to your left will allow for easy navigation through these materials.

ETS Course Explanations

The ETS curriculum stresses not only what is read but how it is read.  The curriculum is organized by topics of reading and modes of critical inquiry. Our goal is not only to show how meanings are created through acts of critical reading, but also to demonstrate the consequences of pursuing one way of reading over another. It matters greatly whether texts are taught from the perspective of authorship, literary history, gender studies and feminism, metaphoric language, or imperialism. For this reason our upper division curriculum has no course titled "Shakespeare," although Shakespeare's plays might be studied in any number of courses bearing such titles "Authors" or "Forms and Genres" or "Reading Nation and Empire." This is why every ETS course has two titles: a broader generic title (such as "Literary Periods" or "Theorizing Representation") that marks out a specific set of interpretive questions and critical methodologies, and a subtitle (such as "Renaissance Poetry" or "American Consumer Culture") that identifies the topic or textual material selected by the professor for emphasis in that particular semester.

A Few Notes

This archive has been designed, generated, and maintained by SU graduate students with the support of the English department, the Future Professoriate Project, and the Graduate School.  Updates and modifications will continue take place as new materials become available, curriculum changes, or new student needs are identified.  SU English graduate students who have information and materials to add to the archive or supplement existing materials should use the contacts link.