The purpose of this course is to expose Computer Science Teaching Assistants to concepts that will help them contribute to a more inclusive and supportive learning environment. In considering what supervisors could realistically require their TAs to complete, we kept our coverage of each topic to a brief introduction in the hopes that many participants will be curious and learn more on their own. We have provided a list of resources, sorted by topic, to encourage further exploration.
This course will be most effective if it is accompanied by small group discussions to help TAs to reflect on the material and consider it from other people's perspectives. Since the logistics of TA work vary significantly between institutions and between different TA roles, this course should always be supplemented with training to cover topics like how to get paid, when and where they are expected to be, what exactly they are expected to do, and (most importantly) who they should contact with questions and/or concerns.
Our approach to the content is shaped by the assumption that this will primarily be used in US colleges and universities. If you are working at an institution outside of the US and have suggestions for changes to make the course more relevant where you are, we would welcome your input!
Everyone reads and processes new information at a different pace, and it's possible that not all of the content in this course will be new to someone. This makes it difficult to predict how long it will take a particular person to complete this course. However, based on self-reported completion times, the average time to complete all topics is 4 hours.
This course is adapted from the work of the Mount Holyoke College Computer Science Department and Dr. Becky Wai-Ling Packard. The original near-peer mentoring program was called Megas and Gigas Educate (MaGE) and funded by a grant from Google.
All of the ideas you will find here are based on the scholarship of others, such as bell hooks, Ximena Zúñiga, Paulo Freire, and Beverly Daniel Tatum. Regardless of where we first encountered them, most of the ideas can be traced back to the scholarship of Women of Color. We do not claim any ownership or rights to this knowledge. If you find the way we present this content to be useful, please feel free to share it and further explore the many sources listed on the Additional Resources page. We just ask that you remember and credit the groundbreaking scholars who made this work possible.
The course begins here:
You can navigate to a particular topic from here:
There will be opportunities for TAs to share feedback at the end of each topic and at the end of the course. We always welcome further feedback from anyone who has interacted with the course.
Please send us any thoughts or suggestions at aiice.ta.pd@gmail.com