The first time you lead a discussion section, oversee a lab, or teach a class can feel like jumping into the deep end of a swimming pool when you’re not sure you can swim to the other side. Now imagine not even being sure what’s in the pool, and you’ll get an idea what it’s like to be an international Graduate Student Instructor (IGSI).
One fifth of Berkeley’s Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) come from outside the United States. Some don’t speak English as their first language. All bring a whole different set of experiences and expectations to the classroom. Yet for all these differences, any GSI can learn from their international colleagues’ adaptability and resilience.
For the undergraduates they teach, IGSIs bring something extra to the classroom above and beyond their expertise in their fields, says Sharon Waller, the assistant director of the Graduate Division’s GSI Teaching and Resource Center and director of the International GSI Program. “The most obvious advantage,” she says, “is a different perspective, a different approach to thinking and looking at issues and bodies of knowledge.”
Accent on Learning
The California Legislature in 1989 mandated that all teaching assistants for whom English is not a native language pass a language proficiency test. While international students are not specifically mentioned in the legislation, it came about because of parents’ concerns that students couldn’t understand the accents of foreign GSIs.
Even with testing, there’s always going to be some grumbling about a nonnative speaker’s English, says Waller. But studies have shown that after two or three weeks, students get used to their teachers’ accents. “Once students get past this mental obstacle of language issues and recognize that their GSI has a tremendous wealth of knowledge, then they tend to feel pretty satisfied,” she notes.
Waller advises IGSIs to get the accent matter out in the open, pointing out, “It just doesn’t work very well to pretend that there is nothing to talk about.” By urging students to speak up if they’re having difficulty understanding, the instructor promotes an open and communicative atmosphere in the classroom.
“It’s actually an icebreaker for the class,” Waller says. “When the IGSI says, ‘This is where I’m from, this is why I’m here, this is the root of my accent,’ it puts students at ease.”
This is exactly how Bin Zeng handles his classes.
“I usually talk about it in my first section. I preempt them,” says the China native, a Ph.D. student in accounting at the Haas School of Business. “I realize I have an accent that is sometimes difficult to comprehend. I strongly encourage students to interrupt me, to ask me to say something again, to put it another way. I try to make everybody comfortable about talking about this.”
Zeng also assures his students that, statistically speaking, his sections always do well, accent or no accent. “I don’t claim all the credit for that,” he tells them, “but at least you don’t have to worry that if you have me, you’re going to do worse than the other sections.”
And finally, he approaches the whole topic with his characteristic good humor. “I tell them, if you look at this positively, you can think of this as good for you,” he says. “When you graduate and your employer asks about your international experience, you can say, ‘I’m very good at handling international clients. I had a GSI in college who had a terrible accent but I still made As!’”
Teaching Props
Besides being open about their accents, Waller urges IGSIs to make liberal use of handouts and other supporting materials that can help get their message across. Zeng and other IGSIs we talked to are masters of the extra effort.
“I feel an obligation to put in more time,” says Zeng. “If you organize the material well and have it on the blackboard and in your handout, it’s much easier for students.”
Zeng also tells his students it’s okay to contact him outside office hours and even at home, if they must.
And do they? “Once they feel I’m not abominable, they take advantage of that,” says Zeng. “And the word spreads. If I taught a section last semester, then they hear, ‘This GSI is really accessible.’”
Of course, there’s a drawback to all this organization and extra work. Take Hrvoje Tkalcic, a geology and geophysics graduate student from Croatia who spoke at last fall’s orientation and teaching conference for IGSIs, sponsored by the GSI Teaching and Resource Center.
“I was confident of my competence in my field, which was a big reassurance,” he said of his experience as a first-time GSI. “But I still worried about choosing the right word.”
To compensate, he held office hours three times a week. Given his English limitations, he found it easier to communicate one-on-one than with 50 students. He also handed out his phone number and his e-mail address. His students did well in class—but Tkalcic had no time for his own studies.
Waller says Tkalcic’s experience was unusual only in that it’s typically a graduate students’ social life that is sacrificed, not his or her studies. Of course, Tkalcic had no time for a social life, either.
Body Language
IGSIs can be so worried about their English that they forget that words are only one means of communication. When IGSIs can’t get their lesson across, says Waller, they tend to think language is the culprit. But, she adds, nonverbal communication—body language—can relay up to 90 percent of the message.
“Sometimes it’s just little things like a certain sense of timing, or proximity to students, or seeming too formal,” she says.
The GSI Teaching and Resource Center offers classes for prospective and current IGSIs on oral English proficiency, cross-cultural communication, and teaching and learning in the U.S. classroom. And IGSIs, like any GSI, can ask center staff for an individual consultation, which may include videotaping a classroom session.
Of the videotaped session, Waller says, “It’s extremely helpful for students to see themselves and to note certain kinds of behaviors. It’s really the perfect medium for looking at both language and nonverbal behavior.”
By viewing himself on videotape, for example, Tkalcic learned he was not looking students in the eye—a simple adjustment that dramatically changed the interaction in his classroom.
Cultural Expectations
Just as body language varies from culture to culture, so do customs. Expectations that IGSIs bring to Berkeley based on their own culture can turn out to be very different from what they find here.
In India, for example, relations between students and teachers are very formal. So Malabika Pramanik, a graduate student in math from West Bengal, had to get used to the sometimes jocular, often challenging dynamic in Berkeley classrooms.
“Here it’s okay for people to just walk out of class if they don’t like it,” she says. “Also it’s considered okay to eat in class while the class is going on. That was something I thought was rude when I came here because it would be considered extremely rude if we did that in India.”
Ruth Björkenwall, a sociology graduate student, assigned her students to work in groups, as was the custom in her native Sweden. But she found students here to be more competitive, less group-oriented. She had to work hard to create a sense of community in her classroom.
At the same time, Björkenwall was surprised by the coddling students seemed to expect from her—a style, she joked, that didn’t sit well with her “rational” Swedish nature.
“I found I was supposed to be attentive to students in a way I never had to be in my country,” she told her fellow IGSIs at the fall orientation conference. “Here, I was expected to hold hands.”
Her advice: you have to draw boundaries.
All GSIs have to deal with setting boundaries, but for IGSIs, this is complicated by cultural differences. “They’re trying to figure out what the rules are,” says Waller. “‘What is appropriate behavior? What expectations do my students or my professor have of me? What are my responsibilities and rights?’”
Then there’s the whole question of grading. What’s considered a good grade in Sweden, said Björkenwall, might not be here in the United States.
At the same time, she realizes that because she’s a foreigner, she could have language or cultural differences that lead to misunderstanding her students’ work. So if they’re really unhappy with a grade, she sends them to the class professor.
Pramanik agrees with that advice. “You want to be sure you’re not giving someone a 30, which you think is a good grade, when another GSI would give them an 80,” she says.
Many IGSIs find U.S. undergraduates less academically prepared than students in their countries. They may come from countries where the courses schools teach are more standardized.
“Even though Berkeley is very selective and has extremely qualified students, students here are coming from all different places, and there really isn’t any standardization,” says Waller. “So there’s a confrontation with diversity on many, many levels.”
The Information Gap
In addition to a language gap and an expectation gap, many international students face what Waller calls an information gap.
“There’s a cultural context that comes into play in comments that students make and the issues surrounding a subject,” she says. “Without knowing what that context is, whether it is specific to Berkeley or to undergraduates in this country, then the IGSI is not able to answer certain questions.”
Take humor. Even Zeng, as witty a conversationalist as you could hope for, laments that humor can be hard to translate. “Sometimes I feel frustrated because I believe I have a very good joke to tell, but I hold it back because of my limited English,” he says, with a rueful laugh. “Even if I tell it, it probably won’t have the effect I want to achieve.”
Waller doesn’t have much good news when it comes to humor. “You have to accept that joking behavior is usually the last thing that comes when you’re learning a language,” she says. But she advises IGSIs not to hold themselves to a narrow—and very American—model of teaching that includes informal, joking behavior.
Pramanik learned this lesson for herself. As part of her preparation to teach, she watched a videotape of GSIs who were considered excellent teachers. Pramanik was particularly taken with an American GSI named Tom. She could tell his students really enjoyed his class by the way they laughed at his jokes. Yet she watched the videotape with a sinking feeling that she’d never be able to teach like that. To begin with, she didn’t get any of the jokes.
Then she realized she was not Tom and never would be. She’d have to give her classes the best of her.
It turns out Pramanik’s students like her Indian anecdotes. While she doesn’t expect them to completely understand Indian culture, she no longer feels she has to put up a pretense. Her advice for fellow IGSIs? “You can’t ever be a great American GSI, but you can be a great international GSI.”
Waller agrees. “Sometimes our IGSIs hold up this ideal and think they have to be a certain way to be successful, to emulate the American model, when actually they just have to be themselves,” she says.
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