People and Interests
Researchers interested in mathematics graduate student teaching assistants (TAs). Primary topics of interest include TA professional development, pedagogical content knowledge relevant to undergraduate mathematics, TA beliefs about mathematics and learning, TA communities, TA biographies, and TA enculturation experiences.
Gutmann, Tim. University of New England.
- Tim was tragicallly killed in a kayaking accident in May 2007. His contributions to the community of researchers will be missed. We will leave this entry up in his memory.
- My interests lie in describing TA communities and the types of interactions that help TAs learn about teaching, about how to value teaching, and about how to balance the demands of teaching and scholarship. Additionally, I am interested in TAs’ biographies and their beliefs about the nature of mathematics.
Speer, Natasha. Michigan State University.
- My work focuses on TAs’ knowledge and beliefs, especially those related to student understanding of calculus and pre-calculus concepts. I am interested in how those factors shape TAs’ teaching practices and their experiences with professional development activities.
Friedberg, Solomon. Boston College
- I am interested in the development of TAs as teachers. I founded the Boston College Mathematics Case Studies Project, which has developed a set of case studies directed at mathematics graduate students that promotes the development of high-quality teaching. Dissemination of these materials is on-going. I also work in number theory and related parts of representation theory.
Hsu, Eric. San Francisco State.
- For the TA group, I am particularly interested in how the teaching community of graduate instructors develops, and the (complex) effects of official support and unofficial ties. I began by focusing on online communities, but found I couldn’t get much traction there without examining live communities.
Kung, Dave. St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
- My work has recently turned toward TAs’ knowledge of student thinking - particularly in Calculus - including how they gain that knowledge and how they do (or do not) use it while teaching.
Bruff, Derek. Vanderbilt University.
- I’ve done mathematics faculty and TA development work at Vanderbilt and Harvard, and I’m now at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching working with faculty and TAs from a variety of disciplines (including mathematics) on their teaching. As a result, I’m particularly interested in models of faculty and TA development that transfer well between disciplines.