Teaching Our Teacher Assistants to Thrive: A Reflexive, Inclusive Approach to Scalable Undergraduate Education

Teaching assistants (TAs) are well-poised to improve student performance and retention-particularly for those from minoritized backgrounds. In this experience report, we present a TA pedagogy course that trains TAs to effectively teach large-scale undergraduate courses in data science-and does so by centering inclusion and the classroom as a social space of engagement. This curriculum is grounded in a justice-oriented pedagogy framework and also tackles the interdisciplinary teaching skills necessary to teach data science. Course topics cover pedagogical frameworks and evidence-based teaching practices alongside professional and management skills that reflect the TA's positionality as both instructor and student. We present our experiences with offering this semester-long course and discuss how to adapt this course to other higher education institutions.