SACS accreditation rules prevent graduate assistants from performing as teachers of record until they have accrued 18 hours in their programs. Essentially, this means that students in their first year of full-time study cannot be teachers of record. It also means that once a student has 18 or more hours, they become more valuable to the University.
Once students have 18 hours, they have the opportunity to apply for an assistantship to teach composition for UCF’s Department of Writing and Rhetoric. In order to qualify, students must first take ENC 5705 (Theory and Practice in Composition), which counts toward the requisite 18 hours. A student’s performance in this course greatly affects their chances of being offered a teaching assistantship.
It is expected that students who are first-year GTAs for the English LCT program will teach for DWR in their second year.
The opportunity to teach one’s own class is an extremely important part of graduate school. Likewise, experience in teaching composition makes a student more qualified to apply to doctoral programs and to teach in the Florida state college system.
English Department graduate students working for DWR will have their tuition waiver provided by the Department of English and their stipend by DWR. Students on teaching assistantships must maintain full-time student status.