ABSTRACT
Over the last decade in particular, universities have increasingly recognized the need for and the benefits of systematic training and development – at least in relation to their mainstream teaching staff. Thus an array of induction courses and update events, run for the most part by central educational or staff development units in cooperation with academic colleagues, now provide opportunities for lecturers to enhance their knowledge, understanding, confidence and competence concerning the processes and practicalities of learning, teaching and assessment. It is only much more recently that the spotlight has begun to pick out a less visible and more transient component of the university teaching workforce: the part-time tutors, language assistants and laboratory demonstrators who are being increasingly deployed – especially in universities with a high research profile – as a way of squaring the circle of larger student classes combined with tight constraints on resources. For, despite a long history of the casual employment of postgraduates and others in these teaching support roles in many UK universities, there are no well-established training and development strategies for this particular group on a par with those widely found in North American universities and colleges where the use of graduate ‘teaching assistants’ is commonplace. However, the recent rapid rise in Britain in the use of part-time tutors, allied to understandable concerns not to put teaching quality in jeopardy as a consequence, have prompted question as to what kinds of training and development this group ought to be offered – and indeed required to undertake.
