GAT Training in Collaborative Teaching at the University of Arizona

In their 1986 WPA article, “Creating the Profession: The GAT Training Program at the University of Arizona,” Marvin Diogenes, Duane H. Roen, and C. Jan Swearingen contrast their view of training teaching assistants with “a traditional department’s view that holds that graduate students are hired hands, duespayers on the lowest rung of the university ladder” (51). The authors propose instead to professionalize the teaching of composition by graduate assistants and associates in teaching (GATs) by welcoming them into the profession as “junior colleagues” (51). They advocate introducing GATs to “the strengths of the profession in the form of the best available scholarship, old and new” (51) and recommend 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 of a mastery of the elements of the teaching situation” (52).