Every year, the Special TA Issue of CORE provides an important means for communicating our diverse and meaningful experiences as TAs to the wider university community. I am extremely proud to introduce this collection of articles written by TAs from our very own York University graduate student community.

Our TA community engages in a huge share of the teaching at this university. We lecture, we explain, we grade, we provide support, we interact with students one-on-one. Year after year, we guide our students through their courses, often with a considerable commitment of time and energy on our part. Our experiences as teachers change us, as instructors, as scholars, and as people. Each one of us travels a unique path to develop that particular combination of theoretical principles and instruments for their implementation that we call our Philosophy of Teaching, and that expresses who we are as educators.

A Philosophy of Teaching statement is not simply an exploration of theories of post-secondary education or a summary of research on adult education. It is a personal statement of our identity as teachers: what our strengths and weaknesses are, what our professional goals are, how we see our roles in our students' educational lives, and what we think the place of post-secondary education is and should be in contemporary Canadian society. But it is more than that: our Philosophy of Teaching directly affects what happens in our classrooms. In every one of our classes we are communicating, albeit tacitly, how we see ourselves as teachers, through our choice of teaching styles and strategies, through our development or application of course policies, through our production of educational aids like lab manuals and tutorial handouts, and through our willingness to take chances in class by trying out a new teaching method or a new educational technology. Developing or adapting classroom strategies to meet our classes' educational needs is a necessary component of our maturation as teachers.

The experience of maturing as a teacher is what each author, in his or her individual way, shares with us in this Special TA Issue. We learn that the process is not an easy one. Developing a Philosophy of Teaching is not arrived at without uncertainties, questions, struggles, and failures. In fact, one of the threads connecting all four articles in this issue is the experience of having turned perceived weaknesses into strengths, and having learned and grown through this process. All four authors took ownership of situations they perceived as problems, and turned them into learning opportunities, for them as well as for their students.

Heather Sparling and Richardine Woodall's articles recount how their willingness to confront feelings of perceived inadequacy resulted in increasing their confidence in the classroom, in developing their skills as teachers, and in improving their relationships with students and between students.

It is a fact of life for TAs that, for a variety of reasons, they often possess less authority in the classroom than their course directors do. Many TAs look young, and in fact are very close to their students in age. For some students, the title "Professor" immediately commands more respect. I will leave aside for today the ways that gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and even height, factor into student perceptions of TAs. What I wish to highlight here is that, regardless of their true mastery of the subject they are teaching, TAs are keenly aware of their position as students in the university institution. After all, are we not pursuing higher education precisely because we want to keep on learning?

In practice, our dual role as teachers and students, and our awareness of it, can result in situations that lead us to question our confidence and our authority. Woodall and Sparling's responses to their respective challenges reflect their own particular and unique situations. Although each author addresses her concerns in a very different manner, there are strong similarities between them: their willingness to take chances, their courage to question the effectiveness of their teaching methods in fulfilling their teaching goals, and their commitment to take action based on their reflections.

For Cecilia Tagliavia and Michael Palamarek, fulfilling their teaching goals meant learning to share effectively their enthusiasm for their respective subjects. Tagliavia's main challenge was teaching in a different university system in a different language. Palamarek was faced with stimulating students' interest in theoretical material, whose relevance to students' lives was not immediately apparent. Although their specific educational concerns were quite different, both authors succeeded in fostering a classroom environment where students were encouraged to engage actively with the course material and to develop their own understanding of the subject.

Any serious reflection on our role and our effectiveness as post-secondary educators brings us face-to-face with complex and difficult questions, such as, what is learning, and how do we facilitate it? Part of our development as teachers may involve re-evaluating our answers to these questions. All four articles give us vivid examples of this process. Although we all have our own path to travel to answer these questions for ourselves, informed by who we are as people and by what we have experienced in and out of the classroom, I truly believe that we will find that teaching is not so much a task we accomplish as it is a lifelong process leading to personal growth, not only as instructors or as Faculty members, but as human beings with contributions to make to the world at large.