Student Spotlight: Niyati Shenoy, PhD Candidate in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies

Niyati Shenoy is a doctoral student in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, and a certificate candidate at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University. In Spring 2021, she served as a Teaching Development Program (TDP) Consultant at the CTL through the Graduate School of Arts and Science Fellowship in Academic Administration program. The TDP allows Columbia doctoral students to cultivate, document, and articulate their teaching development across the arc of their graduate school career.​

In this spotlight, Niyati shares what she has learned as both a participant in the TDP as well as through her experience as a TDP Consultant, including the benefits of peer observation and how her disciplinary interests and research have influenced her teaching, and vice versa.

What motivated you to apply for the TDP Consultant position through the GSAS Fellowship in Academic Administration? What did you gain from the experience? 

After I enrolled in the TDP during my second year at Columbia, I became curious about how a program to teach teaching might be designed and run. I was aware that the TDP was a relatively new program, but also that many, many graduate students were already finding it helpful as a space to combine their research and disciplinary interests with their thoughts about, and ambitions for, good teaching. Working as a Fellow in Academic Administration seemed like a way to leverage the skills we were learning as individual instructors teaching specific courses—course design, student engagement, assessment—into a sort of mini-glimpse at department-level, program-level, curriculum-level planning. For example: How is a series of courses, or a ‘concentration’, actually designed? I gained a lot from this experience, especially some much-needed practice at broad, meta-level thinking about things such as intention, structure, and purpose in a context that was not immediately tied to my academic discipline.

Prior to becoming an FAA/TDP Consultant, you had extensive experience as a participant in the Teaching Development Program, having attended CTL programming. What have you enjoyed most about your engagement with the TDP and these offerings? 

The thing I still enjoy the most about engaging with the TDP is being able to see how others think. Reading peers’ draft syllabi during the Innovative Course Design Seminar, for instance, and asking questions about them afterward, was very interesting—as was experiencing practice lessons or lectures from totally different fields during microteaching sessions. I got even more of this as a TDP Consultant, because I was reviewing workshop reflections and getting to know more about how fellow graduate students understood the work of teaching.

Looking back on your engagements with the CTL, in what ways have your own teaching practices been strengthened by your sustained pedagogical development?

For my dissertation, I am researching the varied approaches of British colonial law to sexual violence in nineteenth century India to uncover better explanations for the prevalence of sexual violence in India today. Participating in the TDP has helped me understand more clearly that though this topic is a heavy one, the things I have learned in the course of trying to understand this history can be resources for my own teaching, and that the history itself is not just something tragic to pass over in sadness and discomfort, but a source of accountability and commitment. In short, I think the CTL has changed the way I reflect on my own motivations and made me more empathetic and aware as an instructor.

Additionally, can you provide a strategy that you use in your own teaching practice that new graduate student instructors might consider incorporating into their own practice?

One of the mainstays of my teaching practice is a belief in close reading and the particular staying power of voices from the past. In discussion sections I frequently hand out short passages from historical source material that students haven’t seen before, and devote some time to discussing and interpreting them even if they aren’t what is assigned. The main purpose of this, for me, is having a low-stakes activity to impress upon students that there is no ‘right’ way to interpret, or even react to, the past; any and all reactions, identifications, thoughts, and musings are welcome. Ultimately my hope is to show that ‘history’ is fundamentally a speculative, contingent, and reversible quality, not a destiny filled with rights and wrongs, fixed and unfixable.