Teaching & Supervising TA

We have taught reflexive TA a lot – in the university classroom, in workshops, and in the context of supervision of graduate student researchers. Building on our relatively early suggestions for teaching and supervision, we’ve developed a suite of resources, guidelines and suggestions for teaching and supervising TA. This includes narrated lectures (and associated PowerPoints) on the foundations of qualitative research, qualitative research design and thematic analysis. You can explore these on the open-access companion website for our book Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide (Sage, 2022). We especially encourage you to read the additional online-only chapter on Teaching, supervising, and examining for quality thematic analysis. Another teaching resource developed by our colleague and collaborator, Gareth Terry, is the thematic pantry.

Most importantly, we encourage anyone teaching TA or supervising TA to be (or become) a reflexively knowing and aware practitioner. You can read more about what we mean in our online-only teaching and learning chapter. But briefly, it starts from the recognition and understanding that we all come to teaching and supervision with assumptions and values, which matter to how we teach. We encourage reflexive practice that explores the values, assumptions, ‘strengths’ and ‘weaknesses’ we bring to our teaching and supervision. Reflexivity is our best tool for understanding our strengths and our limitations, but also for recognising our implicit values and assumptions. And what we call our ‘methodological bandwidth’ – the breadth and depth of experience and understanding we bring to qualitative research.

Given the diversity of approaches to TA, situating reflexive TA within a wider context is important. Our papers around conceptual and design thinking and quality for reflexive TA will be useful tools here. On the quality section of this website, we also provide resources to support quality in teaching and supervision.