Episode 19: Roundtable with TA Award Winners: Part II

Guest: Lucas Wiscons

In the second episode of our two-part series with Campus-Wide TA Award winners, Lynne Prost and Molly Harris speak with Capstone TA Award winner Lucas Wiscons. Lucas reflects on theories, such as “decentering,” that have informed his teaching practice and shares advice for forming positive mentoring relationships, whether between experienced and newer TAs or between faculty supervisors and their TA team.

See the transcript for this episode.

The L&S Exchange Podcast is brought to you by L&S Teaching & Learning Administration and produced by the Instructional Design Collaborative. This podcast is recorded on ancestral Ho-Chunk land, a place their nation has called Teejop (day-JOPE) since time immemorial.

Join the Conversation

How did this episode make you think? What’s on your mind about inclusive teaching? Respond to a poll using the Spotify app on your mobile device, reply with a comment at the bottom of this post, or send us an email. We may ask to feature your contribution in this or a future episode.

Conversation Starters

1. Lucas shares his positive experience of being an Instructional Peer Mentor within the Sociology department. What formal or informal opportunities are there for you to serve as a mentor to other instructors in your department or on campus? What opportunities might you seek out to receive mentorship?
2. Teaching and research can reinforce each other. In what ways do your teaching and research connect? How might you strengthen these connections to benefit both spheres?
3. Lucas argues that the university is a unique place for DEI work because it provides a space to have productive conversations. How do you view the university space relative to other physical and virtual spaces that you and your students occupy? How might you take advantage of the unique benefits of the university setting in your teaching?
4. Lucas focuses on the time in the classroom as an opportunity to be present in community with students and to grow as an instructor. What feels like the best use of classroom time for you and your students? What changes might you make to use your classroom time in ways that align with your values?
5. Lucas shares a story about coming to view assessment as an opportunity to build confidence, and he applies this to building his own confidence as a TA and the confidence of his students.How do you balance evaluation of your students with expressing confidence in your students’ abilities?
6. Across Episodes 18 and 19, our award winners shared ways their teaching has evolved over time. How have your own teaching strategies and approaches changed over time?

Further Reading & Resources

In this episode we mentioned, were inspired by, or wondered about the following resources and topics.

• Lucas’s teaching practice has been informed by Margaret Donaldson’s work on decentering, which asks a teacher to take the perspective of a learner in the classroom. You can find her book Children’s Minds through UW Libraries.
• We connected Lucas’s thoughts on teaching and research to the keynote address at this year’s Teaching & Learning Symposium. You can watch the recording of Dr. Corbin M. Campbell’s “A Rally Call for Teaching Excellence at Flagship Universities: Your Role in the Movement” online.
• If you’re interested in visually representing information with students, as mentioned in our aftershow, a 2019 Edutopia article shares research from college classrooms about The Science of Drawing and Memory.

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