“Radical TAs”: Co-creating liberatory classrooms with undergraduate students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we suggest that when undergraduate students are engaged as full teaching partners with professors in the college classroom, more liberatory and transformative educational spaces can be created. This paper is based on findings from a qualitative participatory study led by a team of six undergraduate students and one professor who engaged in a series of collaborative teaching endeavors (known as the Radical Teaching Assistant Project) at a small liberal arts college in the southern United States. Our findings suggest that positioning undergraduate students as co-teachers in college classrooms (a) fosters deeper student engagement through relatability, (b) creates more accessible and generative learning environments, (c) subverts knowledge hierarchies in the academy, (d) challenges dominant discourses and norms in the classroom, and (e) provides a space to engage in prefigurative politics. We also discuss some key challenges that arise through this model of collaborative teaching. Our findings suggest that students have much to offer college classrooms when they are central actors in designing course curricula and facilitating class sessions for their peers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".