lunabee34

*preens*

I don't honestly know what's up with that, but I have some guesses. I had to take one pedagogy class and it was a joke. It was basically a venting session about how the classes we were teaching were going. I did participate in a Summer Institute of the National Writing Project that got me 6 hours of grad credit that was focused on writing across the curriculum, but I was the only graduate student in English to do so; the rest of the participants were K-12 teachers getting their masters in education. That experience was incredibly useful, but it wasn't required or encouraged by the department; I just lucked into finding out about it.

I think it's not required because the scholarship of teaching and learning is not valued at many institutions, so finding professors to teach these courses is hard. There's also the whole assholey hazing aspect at a lot of places--I learned how to do this on the job or I made it through fine so you sink or swim, too attitude. Also, at many R1s, teaching itself just isn't valued (which is bullshit), so I don't think it occurs to the faculty to do the pedagogy training; they're focused on scholarship training because that's what they value.