Reconsidering Graduate Students’ Education as Teachers: “It Takes a Department!”

The article argues that prevailing approaches to educating graduate students as teachers need to be broadened conceptually and in practice. In particular, it suggests that preparing graduate students to teach constitutes only one component of a two‐fold responsibility of graduate programs: to educate their students both as researchers and as teachers. To establish this linkage, graduate departments require a comprehensive intellectual‐academic center that touches upon all practices of its members, faculty, and graduate students, in research and teaching. The paper suggests that a carefully conceptualized, integrated 4‐year, content‐oriented and task‐based curriculum with a literacy focus provides such an intellectual core. By overcoming the traditional split of language and content, it invites a reconsideration of current practices in teaching and in the relationship of teaching and research. The article elaborates these issues through a case study in one graduate department, focusing on the implications of a reconfigured departmental culture for graduate students’ education as teachers and for their socialization into the profession. It concludes with observations about the nature and conditions of change in higher education.