Effective Jan. 1, Melissa McDaniels will serve as the new director of MSU’s Teaching Assistant Program and as assistant dean in the Graduate School.
“MSU is fortunate to have Dr. McDaniels in this role,” said Karen Klomparens, dean of MSU’s Graduate School. “Her research was on the professional development of early career faculty, so this is a natural extension of her area of expertise. We look forward to working with her on TA development as well as on the wider set of career and professional development activities in the Graduate School.”
She said McDaniels is a scholar of higher education, studying how institutions and individuals can promote inclusive excellence in teaching, learning, student success and faculty retention. McDaniels is widely published on topics of graduate student and faculty career development.
“I see this role as critical to Michigan State’s mission to provide high quality graduate and undergraduate education,” McDaniels said. “Teaching assistants are often the first contact that undergraduate students have with an area of study. A graduate student’s first experience in the classroom as a TA can have a significant impact on his or her desire to teach in the postsecondary classroom during their career.”
McDaniels is currently the director of MSU’s National Science Foundation Advancing Diversity through the Alignment of Policies and Practices grant program in the Office of the Provost. Prior to taking the position with ADAPP she was a research associate in the College of Education’s Center for the Scholarship of Teaching. McDaniels has also held positions at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Northeastern University, Boston University, Boston College and the National Geographic Society.
MSU’s Teaching Assistant Program was started in the late 1980s to orient international teaching assistants and was expanded in the early 1990s to offer training to all teaching assistants. It now provides orientation programming for approximately 300 new teaching assistants each year, as well as limited language instruction for international teaching assistants and professional development workshops and activities.