We've Moved!
Visit SDSU’s new digital collections website at https://digitalcollections.sdsu.edu
Description
Graduate Teaching Associates (GTAs) work and live in the liminal space between being a teacher and being a student. While they are charged with the responsibility for teaching a first year general education course, at the same time they are in the same position as their students; they too are students in graduate seminars. The liminality often intensifies because of a number of challenges to their authority that GTAs face. First, their authority can be challenged as they move back and forth between these identities, particularly when the demands in one or the other role increase over the course of the semester. A second challenge to authority relates to the fact that often GTAs are only a few years older than the students they are teaching. Third, GTAs more often than not are new to teaching and thus their authority can be challenged based on their lack of experience. Fourth, the authority of GTAs can be challenged based on the fact that they hold only a BA degree, when most of the professors that teach in the same program have Ph.D.s and Masters degrees surround them. Challenges to the authority of GTAs can also be affected by the GTAs' gender. All of these challenges lead GTAs to develop communicative strategies to move out of the liminal space and into a position of authority as instructors in a college classroom. They must discover how to overcome these challenges and communicate authority to their students, and negotiate and establish a GTA identity in this liminal position, with only one week orientation, if that. They struggle with students challenging their authority based on their gender, age, race, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, size, experience, and other issues as they negotiate power with their students. This study was conducted by interviewing GTAs in several master's programs about how they communicate authority and how theirs is challenged by students. The results suggest that students challenge the authority of GTAs directly and indirectly and GTAs communicate authority with other-oriented communication and other-oriented communication. Practical implications are that GTAs would benefit from incentives and training that would help them manage their students.
