ABSTRACT
In their 1986 WPA article, “Creating the Profession: T he G A T Training Program at the University o f Arizona,” M arvin Diogenes, D uane H. Roen, and C . Jan Swearingen contrast their view o f training teaching assistants with “a traditional departm ent’s view that holds that graduate students are hired hands, duespayers on the lowest rung o f the university ladder” (51). T he au thors propose instead to professionalize the teaching o f com position by grad uate assistants and associates in teaching (GATs) by welcoming them into the profession as “junior colleagues” (51). They advocate introducing GATs to “the strengths o f the profession in the form o f the best available scholarship, old and new” (51) and recom m end that administrators “ abandon a basic skill approach to training graduate students” and “empower graduate students by
giving them access to rhetorical control in the classroom, a control born o f a mastery o f the elements o f the teaching situation” (52).
