Exploration of Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Identity and Teaching Goals in Data Science Courses

Many undergraduate computing programs employ undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs), who are uniquely positioned to positively contribute to classroom and student retention. In this exploratory study, we study UTAs who enrolled in a data science professional pedagogy training course. In the first semester, we collected UTA survey responses and journal entries, which were assignments in the pedagogy course; in the second semester, we interviewed UTAs and observed their classrooms. We examine how awareness of positionality - a critical theme of the pedagogy course - informed teaching goals and practices. We perform a qualitative analysis to explore the following research questions: RQ1: How does UTA identity and/or academic and personal experiences influence their teaching goals? RQ2: How do the teaching goals in RQ1 translate to teaching practices?