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A collaborative approach to preparing MFA art students to teach at the university level.

Article Excerpt
Each year, thousands of students enter art programs around the country with the aspiration of becoming university art professors. The irony is that many of these students receive little or no preparation to help them fulfill this goal. (1) The general assumption among university art faculty is that students come to MFA programs to hone their artistic skills, and teaching assignments or assistantships are often seen as simply a way to provide financial support to graduate students while they work in their studios.

Recently, however, a growing number of university art programs are recognizing the need to offer more formal preparation in pedagogy to their graduate students who receive teaching assistantships. With the increasingly important role that graduate teaching assistants play in providing undergraduate education in university art programs, it is imperative to develop and strengthen the teaching skills of these colleagues-in-training.

Living in a consumer-oriented society, we in academia are hearing the roar for accountability from legislators, students, and parents that students "get their money's worth" from their education. The mantra has gotten louder as higher education has been called on to provide a quality education to students and to do so with diminishing public resources. In response, universities have increasingly relied on graduate students and adjunct instructors to teach undergraduate courses, as reflected in a 2006 Chronide of Higher Education report that 46 percent of instructors in higher education were part-time, nontenured faculty. (2) Given the mounting pressure from outside the university for accountability, the growing awareness of challenges that teachers face in today's college classroom, and the increasing recognition among art faculty of the impact of temporary workers on the undergraduate curriculum, an appropriate level of support and training for graduate teaching assistants should be a crucial component of our educational mission.

In this article, we provide a historical review of the MFA degree and its role in academia. We then describe the collaborative approach taken by the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida in preparing graduate art students to teach foundations classes in our undergraduate program. We conclude with a list of lessons learned from our experience in teaching MFA students how to teach art...

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