Enacting and/or contesting the ‘normal TA body’: social location and the experiences of teaching assistants

ABSTRACT

While social location substantially impacts faculty experiences on university campuses, comparatively little research has explored the experiences of undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants (TAs). Drawing on semi-structured interviews, this study explores how TAs at one Canadian university construct their identities as they teach. We employ the concepts of self-presentation and performativity to consider the interplay between TAs’ socially-influenced enactments of self and how these are read and interpreted by students. Our findings suggest that TAs have markedly different experiences in the classroom based on their social location and that they engage in processes of impression management. Ultimately, our findings point toward a need to develop institutional initiatives that support TAs in navigating complex processes of embodiment, self-presentation, and disclosure in the classroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching assistants
• equity
• intersectionality
• embodiment
• self-presentation

Acknowledgements

We want to acknowledge and thank Tianna Follwell, a vital member of the research team who contributed substantially throughout this project—including by offering feedback that shaped this manuscript in important ways. While Tianna had moved on to other projects and priorities by the time this manuscript was being finalized, and thus elected not to be a coauthor, we are grateful for her support of the work being published, alongside her many other important contributions to the research. This work was also supported by the McMaster University Student Partners Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

This project received ethics clearance from the McMaster University Research Ethics Board (Protocol #2018 080). Informed consent was documented via hard copy/electronic consent forms. Due to a researcher error that resulted in a minor deviation from our ethics protocol, we re-contacted 3 affected participants in October 2021 to inform them of our error and ask if they still consented to participate. All three gave consent by email.

Notes

1 Due to an oversight in record-keeping, we cannot confirm definitively that all transcripts were double-checked. Our files affirm that most (28) were, however.

2 We neglected to ask participants about their preferred pronouns. Thus, we use gender-neutral they/them pronouns throughout, and underline that participants may have different preferences.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by McMaster University - Student Partners Program: [Grant Number n/a].