Reclaiming Authority in the FYC Classroom as a Graduate Teaching Assistant: Using Feminist Pedagogies to Empower

Literature Review

Concepts and Pedagogies of Authority in the First-Year Composition Classroom

In the 1980s and up into the early 2000s, composition and feminist scholars argued for a more egalitarian approach to authorial presence in the writing classroom. Part of this shift included a call for more women’s perspectives in academia (Flynn; Ritchie and Boardman) because of the recognition that anyone who is not a white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class man has a very different experience in education due to institutional and historical oppressions (Ellsworth; Rakow). Elizabeth Ellsworth names anyone outside of this traditional identity as the “Inappropriate Other”: one who must fight for the authority and respect automatically granted to the white male professor (321). Many other women working in the academy have published scholarship that explains how the classroom’s lack of political neutrality (Rakow; Weiler) should encourage women to embrace their authority and claim their identity and expertise to fight against institutionally imposed Otherness (Friedman; hooks).

Scholars of color have complicated this notion by viewing teaching with a more intersectional lens—women of color have different parameters of both authority and Otherness because of institutional structures like racism that do not affect white instructors (hooks; Johnson-Bailey and Lee; Logan). Many feminists of color offer advice on how instructors can feel comfortable teaching and embracing their identities in spaces where they may both be and feel marginalized and like the Inappropriate (underqualified, wrong, overwhelmed, anxious, etc.) Other. A serious emphasis has been placed on investigating and listening to how women of color’s experiences are different, often more challenging, and present different obstacles than their white counterparts (Vargas) because authority does not mean the same thing for everyone. As this is true for faculty writing instructors, it is also true for graduate teaching assistants in the first-year writing classroom who may be marginalized in terms of both identity and institutional positionality.

Authority and Positionality for Graduate Teaching Assistants

While this scholarship on feminist pedagogy from diverse voices has grown due to contributions from scholars such as bell hooks (Talking Back, Teaching to Transgress), Shirley Wilson Logan (“‘When and Where I Enter’”), Juanita Johnson-Bailey and Ming-Yeh Lee (“Women of Color in the Academy”), Joy Ritchie and Kathleen Boardman ("Feminism in Composition”), Kathleen Weiler (“Freire,” Women Teaching), and more, there is not enough scholarship on how graduate students specifically, especially those with marginalized identities, can apply feminist pedagogies to their classrooms. Graduate Teaching Assistants face different circumstances than many of their faculty colleagues due to their temporary and often tenuous position in the university, though many writing instructors in adjunct and lecturer positions also face precarities of employment. Feminist pedagogy, especially scholarship informed by teachers of color, offers the best guide for new GTAs in establishing embodied instructor presence and authority because these pedagogical practices account for and cater to the whole person.

Writing about their respective time as graduate students, Ayo Mansaray refers to the TAship as “boundary work” (171), and Kylee Thacker Maurer and Faith Matzker describe GTA identities as “under continuous construction” (105). Speaking from her experience as a GTA in a PhD program, Stacia Dunn Neeley claims that being in the figurative middle of the academy, both student and teacher, makes it difficult to establish an instructor persona. When existing in this liminal space, it can be difficult for GTAs to establish a strong sense of who they are as instructors, especially if GTAs must contend with additional institutional marginalizations of their identities. In his MA thesis, Sterling James interviewed his fellow GTAs and conducted research on the training and pedagogy process at his university. James found that “[t]he professional development of GTAs is merely about how to teach writing effectively, not necessarily considering the bodies, personalities, or the environment graduate students teach in, where they might have to consider their race, gender, or age because those may be many aspects that go unnoticed in the preparation of teaching” (17). In other words, while there is a focus on composition pedagogy in GTA training, there is often a lack of recognition of how identity affects a GTAs ability to teach and work as an instructor. Unsurprisingly, James also found that GTAs relied more on their personal experiences and embodiments than their pedagogical education when they started teaching (64).

As James and Neeley confirm, many GTAs are thrust into teaching for the first time with limited experience, knowledge, and awareness of expectations. By embracing tenets of feminist pedagogy like authority, credibility, positionality, and embodiment as described by feminist teachers and feminists of color, I offer a guide for new instructors that allows for acceptance and expression of their individual identities. I begin with authority and credibility when addressing instructor presence because, as a new GTA and instructor of a classroom, authority was something I technically had but did not necessarily feel comfortable with. I did not know how to see myself in the classroom, which led to not knowing how to present myself to my students. Using feminist pedagogy as a guide to reclaiming my authorial presence through validating my own credibility, something teachers and women of color have been doing systematically for ages, I began to establish a more identity-affirming, embodied instructor presence.