Understanding Your Dual Roles
While working as a teaching associate you occupy two roles. On one hand, you are a student—you have student responsibilities, student needs, courses, and a student-instructor relationship with your faculty supervisors. On the other hand, you are part of an instructional team, either assisting faculty or being the primary instructor. This second role puts you on the instructor side of the student-instructor relationship...sort of.
This blend of roles affects your place in the landscape of university policies and procedures:
- You are a graduate student, and you are bound by the Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities, and Conduct.
- You are an instructor, so you are also bound by (a variation of) the Academic Handbook, especially if you are a lab or primary instructor:
- Teaching Associates in an IU school: Academic Handbook for Student Academic Appointees
- Teaching Associates in a Purdue school: Purdue University Graduate Staff Employment Manual
- You are a dependent practitioner, i.e., you work with and for a faculty member who has responsibility over your work. As a result, you need to be in regular communication with that faculty member because he or she shares some responsibility for the work you do.
These dual roles overlap at several points—e.g., balancing school and work loads, social interaction with students, authority with students in the classroom, and working well with faculty who are part colleagues but mostly supervisors. But while tricky, you can navigate these roles with careful thought, clear communication, and an awareness of your responsibilities and obligations.
Confidentiality and You
Part of your dual status is that you will know information about students (e.g., their grades, demographic information, and what they share with you in office hours or via email regarding course assignments and their struggles in class). In your role as instructor, keeping a level of confidentiality about student work and academic performance is a must. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) limits access to students’ personal and academic records only to those serving a legitimate academic purpose.
To put it simply, the work your students do in the classroom stays there, and you will want to avoid sharing outside of class details about students that could potentially identify them individually (names, completed assignments, grades, etc.). You should not share this sort of information with friends, on social media, or even while venting about a frustrating day outside of class. Students need to know that their rights are being protected. Please note that email is not considered a secure mode of communication, so actual student grades should never be discussed via email.
If you are helping a faculty member or your supervisor teach a course, you can discuss with that person information about your teaching and the students you share in order to find guidance and support. If you ever have a question about what or how much you can share, ask your supervisor(s), consult the IU Indianapolis confidentiality policy, and/or complete the IU FERPA tutorial.
Providing a Safe Learning Environment
Students also have a right to feel physically and emotionally safe on campus. Below are some general policies, procedures, and principles of which you need to be aware. Some are specific to individual buildings and schools, some apply across the university:
- Students with Special Needs: As a teaching associate, you may have students with disabilities in your classes or labs, and these students may ask for accommodations based on university policy. All information about student special needs is confidential and cannot be shared by you with the other students in your courses—any accommodation that you make should be done in a way that respects the privacy and wishes of the student. For more information, visit the website for Adaptive Educational Services.
- IU Indianapolis Sexual Harassment Policy: In your dual role as a teaching associate you are both bound to and protected by this policy. For more information on prevention and support, visit the SAPIR website.
- Emergency Procedures: Emergencies include fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, active shooters, evacuations, chemical spills, severe weather, and more, and it is your responsibility to know what to do if one of these situations arises while you are teaching or assisting. Check in advance with your building or department staff for emergency information about the classrooms and offices that you will be using. For information on university-wide emergency procedures, visit the Emergency Procedures page on the Protect.IU website.
Understanding Academic Integrity
While teaching IU Indianapolis students, you will have the opportunity to see the work and success of your students first hand. Unfortunately, from time to time you may have concerns about whether or not a student did his or her own work, copied the work of another, or cheated on an assessment. All students are expected to follow the IU Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities, and Conduct related to Academic Integrity. Plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty are serious issues that can impact the learning experience, and, therefore, are issues that you must address if they arise.
If you have concerns about the integrity or authenticity of student work, we recommend that you discuss this concern immediately with your faculty supervisor. Seeking the advice of faculty will help you do what is expected in these situations, because IU Indianapolis has specific procedures for handling student academic misconduct, and your department or program may as well. Also, if you are interested in learning more about how to identify plagiarism, refer to the IU School of Education's "How to Recognize Plagiarism" tutorial. Finally, visit this link to review techniques for promoting student academic integrity in your classes.
Technology Policies and Procedures
IU Indianapolis has many technology-related policies of which you should be aware. Below are some select policies, procedures, and guidelines to help get you started:
- Confidentiality and privacy expectations extend to digital materials. Be careful with USB/flash drives containing student or protected information of any sort. Create strong passwords to protect your accounts, especially those containing student academic or personal data.
- Through contracts with outside vendors, IU Indianapolis has access to a variety of third-party software and services, such as Box, Connect, and other collaborative tools. As a teaching associate you can use third-party tools like Google Docs, wikis, social networking tools, and similar services, but be aware that use of these tools requires that they meet certain conditions. Talk with your faculty supervisor or coordinator so that they can support you if you are using a tool provided by an outside vendor.
- On a similar note, social networking tools can bring both benefits and challenges to the classroom. The IU guidelines on the "Use of Social Networks, Blogs, Wikis, and Other Third-Party Hosted Tools in Instruction" can help you balance the use of these tools to maximize student learning.
- To meet your learning objectives, you may decide to use audio, video, and other material that others have produced in your classes or labs. When you want to use copyrighted material (e.g., clips from films, television, and music; professionally created art, photos, and digital media, etc.), be sure to consult the IU KnowledgeBase article on posting copyrighted material, the IU Indianapolis Center for Teaching and Learning’s fair use checklist, or the IUB Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning’s copyright and fair use page before you show or make the material available to your students.