Pedagogical Encounters, Graduate Teaching Assistants, and Decolonial Feminist Commitments

Abstract

Attempts to reform graduate teaching assistant (GTA) programs and enhance GTAs’ pedagogical experiences have been longstanding areas of interest in higher education. With the neoliberal climatic shift across US higher education, greater strains have been placed on departments to fulfill instructional roles that produce an output of quality student learners with limited investments into the development of pedagogical philosophies and praxis of the GTA workforce. Through examination of the interconnections between GTAs’ pedagogical philosophies, pedagogical experiences, and systemic structural inequalities, empirical studies can reveal spaces of struggle that speak back to institutional cultures of power and privilege and illuminate opportunities for social justice transformation in GTA programs across disciplines in higher education. Cognizant of the important role GTAs play at research universities, higher education research includes numerous empirical studies that explore the experiences of GTAs. Yet these experiential studies have customarily occurred in isolation of scholarly inquiry and dialogue on the pedagogical philosophies held by GTAs. Contemporary research on GTAs’ experiences is situated across academic disciplines and identifies the need for increased pedagogical content knowledge through early training and preparation (Dunn-Haley and Zanzuchhi) and professional development (Gardner and Jones). Current literature examines GTAs’ personal experiences and perspectives on the responsibilities associated with their role (Cho et al.; Green; Jia and Bergerson), professional identity development (Archer; Dunn-Haley, and Zanzuchhi; Green), and includes revelations of negative emotional feelings, diminished self-efficacy (Prieto and Altmaier), and classroom management challenges and concerns (Luo, Bellows, and Grady). While most studies have focused on the symbolic experiences of GTAs’ university interactions, few studies have examined those experiences through a structural analysis that centers the concept of power (Lowe and Pugh). Moreover, there remains a significant absence of literature theorizing and researching GTAs’ pedagogical experiences and development in context of their expressed pedagogical philosophies and social justice commitments, and in Pedagogical Encounters, Graduate Teaching Assistants, and Decolonial Feminist Commitments