English 680, Teaching Internship in English, is designed to introduce Master’s students to college teaching and to allow doctoral students to broaden their preparation for teaching. Ordinarily, Master’s students intern in lower division courses (100- and sometimes 200-level); PhD students may intern in upper division courses for majors. Under no circumstances are interns to be placed in courses at the 500-level or above. Interns who have teaching or grading duties must register for English 680.
MA students completing the “Teaching Composition Plan” must take ENG 680; MA students completing the “Careers in the Humanities Plan” may take either ENG 680 or ENG 622; MA students completing the “Thesis Plan” may take ENG 680 but in addition to not within their 30 hours of required coursework.
Internships are designed as work with or under a mentor, not as team-teaching experiences. Masters students will normally have insufficient course work to hold a teaching position; PhD students may have ample course work completed, but they also have substantial duties as TAs in one or two courses they teach independently each semester. Further, undergraduates who enroll in upper-level English courses reasonably expect that the course will be taught by a member of the faculty. Accordingly, interns are expected to teach under direct supervision of the faculty member in charge of the class, with no more than one class taken by the student in the absence of the supervising faculty member. In extraordinary and unexpected circumstances (jury duty, illness, etc.), the faculty can, in consultation with the Graduate Director, modify this policy.
Interns should be required to do no more than an average of 10 hours work per week, including class preparation and attendance, grading, student conferences and teaching. They are responsible for consulting with the faculty member in the planning stages of the course and syllabus, where possible, and for working with the faculty member in all aspects of the course, including responding to assignments and teaching classes. It is normally expected that in intern will teach one “unit” of a course (e.g. a text, an author, a section of a topic); in a literature course, for example, this might amount to about two or three weeks, while in a writing course it might amount to the preparation and revision of one paper or story.
Normally masters students should take the internship after at least 12 hours of graduate course work are completed. PhD students should defer the internship until the end of their regular course work; this deferral helps them to maintain continuous enrollment without exceeding allowable dissertation hours and allows them to target their internship toward their preparation for the job market.
Ordinarily tenured or tenure-track members of the graduate faculty supervise internships. Exceptions may be made under unusual circumstances in consultation with the Department Head.
Registration for an internship is manual. You can get the required paperwork from the graduate administrative assistant. You must get the permission of a faculty supervisor AND file a short summary of the responsibilities to which you and the faculty supervisor agreed. This summary must be given to the Graduate Administrative Assistant (Alyson Everhart ) before you register for the class.
Download a copy of this policy
Department of English
UNC Greensboro
Physical Address:
3143 Moore Humanities and Research Administration Building
Greensboro, NC 27412
Mailing Address:
P.O. Box 26170
Greensboro, NC 27402
Phone: 336-334-5311
Fax: 336-334-3281
Email: english@uncg.edu
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