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My introduction to graduate school in rhetoric and composition was simultaneously an introduction to the “feminized” (Bartlett, 2003; Holbrook, 1991; Schell, 1992) status of labor in the discipline. At the training for new graduate student instructors (GSIs) in my MA program, a string of university administrators, including our WPA, told us how extremely valuable and important our work in first-year writing was. In a large university, our writing classes stood out as some of the only courses in which students would get individualized attention from teachers. As writing teachers, we had the ability to not only help students develop as writers, we were told, but also support their adjustment to college life. After bestowing us with this enormous responsibility, our department concluded the orientation by showing us how to apply for food stamps. Evidently, the labor we would perform as writing instructors was laudable, but not worthy of a living wage.
As I began teaching first-year writing, I found my days saturated with emotional labor. Students appeared in my office distraught, worried that they had chosen the wrong major or the wrong school. I spent long hours conferencing with students and carefully composing feedback on their writing, hoping to help them gain confidence. Having just started graduate school myself, I wondered, like Crystal Zanders, “How can we be there for our students when we can barely be there for ourselves?” (Day et al., 2021, p. 393). When I entered my PhD program, I found that I was not alone in not knowing how to balance my needs and those of my students. On multiple occasions, I witnessed my peers consoling crying students in our shared office. I listened to a classmate explain how she had fallen behind on her own coursework because she was giving so much time to her students. GSIs at my institution are privileged to only shoulder a one-one teaching load with small class sizes, but it’s the type of work—care work—we do that makes even this workload unsustainable for many of us.
Feminist compositionists have identified the feminization of composition, or its association with care work, as an underlying cause of poor working conditions for contingent instructors. Despite similarities between GSIs and other contingent faculty, we have largely been left out of this conversation. Most existing scholarship on GSI labor in composition also does not engage with teaching writing as feminized, caring labor. In response, I draw on the insights of feminist writing studies scholarship to theorize GSI labor as care work. After providing a brief overview of care work in writing studies, I explain how GSIs’ dual status as students and teachers can increase the amount of care work we perform. Arguing that one method for improving our working conditions lies in reducing the burden of care work on GSIs, I then offer several pedagogical strategies that redistribute care among students: putting students into stable peer groups, centering peer response, and scheduling time for rest. I conclude by briefly discussing the possibilities for such approaches in not only promoting labor justice, but also building sustainable communities of care (currie & Hubrig, 2022; Day et al., 2021).