Download PDFAdditional Labor and Stressors on POC Graduate Students
Sujash’s story: As an international graduate teaching assistant, I have always felt like a cuckoo hatchling. In Bangladesh, we have a saying, “Kaaker Bashay Kokil,” which translates to: an unwanted cuckoo in a family of crows. Cuckoo or the Kokil Pakhi doesn’t build its nest; it lays its eggs in a crow’s nest (Kaaker Basha). When the baby Kokil is finally born, the crow kicks the hatchling out because of its perceived difference. I would argue that the cuckoo hatchling and the racialized immigrant have a lot in common. As a graduate instructor, I have felt I needed to fit in just like the cuckoo hatchling among others. In my classroom I often felt challenged as a face of authority in front of my students, because of how I looked as a person of color, because of how I spoke English as a non-native speaker. As a student-instructor it was more than a duality, it was a multi-identity formed by my very different upbringing in academia, my vulnerability as a graduate student going through the bureaucratic hoops of immigration, my student-centered approach in teaching in which I was trying to reduce a tension stemming from student-teacher power dynamics. The teacher-student dual role in a grad program thus becomes much more complicated than a duality. However, pedagogically, this complex duality or multiplicity of identities instills in me an ethics of care (Gilligan, 2014) for my students, especially students coming from precarious backgrounds. Like Youssef (2023), I was often clueless as to what I was really doing in the classroom when it came to navigating cultural differences with my Native English Speaker Students (NESS). I resorted to sharing my anecdotes of my own student life in Bangladesh or asking them about their favorite memes. My motivation was to build an environment of care even if at times it felt silly.
As an immigrant, a racialized other, I always feel a constant fear or a precarity of being kicked out/deported due to any immigration paperwork oversight. I came to America in 2012 as an international student pursuing a bachelor’s degree. Since then, surviving through institutional and affective violences disguised as assimilative measures, I have come to realize how racialized identities like mine are under constant scrutiny. I would argue that one could call this affective alienation a “cuckoo hatchling syndrome.” Despite me somewhat fitting in as a teacher of writing through innumerable training sessions and orientations, it has been challenging to teach as a graduate teaching assistant with a racialized immigrant identity, due to either a “hypervisibility” (Cedillo, 2020) because of paperwork and or an “invisibility” in the national conversations on higher education. I am simultaneously hyper visible, in the context of my immigration process in which I had to lay my private life bare to this nation’s bureaucratic authority, and invisible due to a lack of healthy representation of folks like me in academia.
Matt’s story: After getting big into linguistic justice as a way to support students but also as a means of starting my own language reclamation journey, I jumped on every linguistic justice project available to me. During my undergrad, this was easy as I had ample free time to do this work between the non-session project time at the University Writing Center and outside of my courses. This, however, changed when I started grad school. Workload went up, we started engaging with more theory which I was not in the practice of reading, and on top of all of this I was teaching for the first time. I didn’t adjust well. I ran myself into the ground trying to balance everything while trying to continue my engagement with linguistic justice when I could. “If not me, a person of color, then who?” I thought to myself continuously. By the time I was engaging in larger seminar projects (and eventually my master’s thesis) it felt like I had nothing else to give. This burnout resulted in now haunting memories of not speaking up to discuss how "standard English" as the goal of FYC is problematic or not feeling I gave students enough background on how they can leverage their linguistic repertoires. I felt guilty that I didn’t do/say anything but was reassured that the work that I did do, especially with my students, was enough as many of them faced linguistic discrimination so they easily connected the scholarship and discussions to their lived experiences.
After moving to UW-Madison, however, I was faced with a new challenge. No longer was my classroom primarily composed of students of color, many of whom were multilingual. Many of the students I have now come from backgrounds in which English was the only language they spoke. The readings and activities I had prior now take up different meaning as the connection was no longer that of lived experiences but the experiences of others. I wasn't intimidated in bringing up the conversation but I was certainly fearful of being the person who first introduces the topic of linguistic justice to many of my students. I questioned myself, am I going to represent the topic, right? Am I going to approach it in a way that engages with meaningful discomfort without causing students who might not be familiar with the connections between language and race to foreclose themselves from learning about the issue? It felt like a spiral of more and more questions on top of these. My fears of burnout as a result of these questions started to kick in as I was building the lesson plan to discuss linguistic justice. Ultimately, from what I gathered, the lesson was well received though even now I am still worried about what happens if, in the future, I misstep because of burnout, an off day, or something else? Will I tarnish students’ perspective on the topic ultimately pushing them away from the topic entirely? Will I be failing the amazing scholars that inspired my interest in linguistic justice like Baker-Bell (2020), Young (2010), and Inoue (2019)? I guess it comes down to this: as a person of color whose experiences are connected to linguistic discrimination (via my family’s experiences with language), opening unfamiliar students’ orientations to the topic and providing students who have experienced linguistic discrimination the representation they deserve is extremely important to me and I want to get it right.
While we have different experiences, our work points to the additional emotional labor that weighs on us (like the trauma of going to the US citizenship process in Sujash’s case) or we feel compelled to take up given our racialized identities (such as Matt wanting to ensure he best represents the linguistic justice scholarship). This emotional labor we are doing is amplified because we are situated at a PWI and the complexities that come with working with students. We acknowledge the emotional labor that comes with interacting with students is not something isolated to our discussion about race and graduate student-instructors but we still want to add greater nuance surrounding the interactions that being racialized has on our positions as graduate student-instructors of color.
Sujash’s experiences converse well to the work of Alam (2024) who discusses similar concerns about his potential interactions with students given his precarity as a graduate student on a F-1 visa trying to discuss race in the classroom. In both the case of Alam (2024) and Sujash, there are very justified reasons to avoid difficult conversations in the classroom like race, navigating cultural differences, and managing the hauntings of their respective precarious positions. Nevertheless, both of them are compelled to take up this emotional labor to resist reinforcing the centrality of whiteness in their writing classrooms and, more importantly, best support all their students. For Alam (2024), he felt compelled to talk about race in the classroom because of its potential to allow for students of color to have the room to share their experiences and white students to gain some more in-depth understanding of race. For Sujash, this was wanting to ensure that he could provide a caring classroom for his students. Their work highlights the emotional labor happening for them as, despite their work with the precarious positions they find themselves in, both as a result of their racialization and citizen status, they feel responsible for resisting hegemonic structures that normalize the white body and lack of care in the classroom.
Matt’s story also emphasizes his desire to best support his students though from a less precarious position as someone who did not have to engage with visas and/or the immigration process. In his case, Matt’s story speaks to the ways in which emotional labor is amplified for racialized graduate student-instructors at PWIs because being one of the only people of color in the room requires the additional work of covering difficult topics surrounding race, like linguistic justice, while also attempting to avoid becoming what students believe is the definitive voice on a topic so nuanced. This challenge and emotional labor are things that we see paralleling the experiences that Randall (2019) discusses, though we know there are additional intersecting identities that make her experiences different. In particular, she highlights her experiences being asked about topics that involve race and being happy she cultivated a community in which her students felt comfortable asking but also weighed down by the additional emotional labor she would have to bring to the classroom as a graduate student-instructor. Both Randall (2019) and Matt, then, showcase how emotional labor as a result of racialization manifests in the classroom and the complexities that come with it as discussing these topics both adds additional emotionally heavy work but also can disrupt students’ perceptions of how race functions in the United States alongside offering some validation and representation for students of color.