Doing It for Ourselves: Creating Spaces for, and by, Early Career Instructors

The landscape of teaching in political science has dramatically transformed over the past decade due to increasingly diversifying campuses, COVID learning interruption, and emerging classroom technology. While more political science graduate programs are offering pedagogical training, these courses are often one-off classes covering the basics of teaching and learning. Rarely are graduate students able to study or train on cutting-edge dilemmas or issues in the classroom. In response to this unfilled need, one of the chapter coauthors co-founded the Western Political Science Association Inclusive Pedagogy and Teaching Virtual Community (WPSA ITVC). Since 2020, the community has been led by a majority of early career instructors (ECIs) and has held over two dozen events on topics related to increasing classroom accessibility and inclusivity, including workshops on trauma-informed education, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), generative AI, writing feedback, and preparing for the job market. In this chapter, we reflect on our position as co-chairs of the WPSA ITVC on the process of creating and supporting a learning community for ECIs as ECIs. We argue that peer-learning communities such as this enhance disciplinary collaboration on teaching and learning, close gaps in the accessibility of instructional training, and break down traditional hierarchies in the space of teaching and learning.