Download PDFCare Work and GSI Labor
Following Robinson’s (2021) definition of care work as involving all the work writing teachers do to promote academic achievement and wellbeing for our students and coworkers, I argue that GSIs’ primary workload consists of care work. The same can be said, of course, for part-time, contingent, and NTT instructors. While I fully agree that GSIs are “contingent laborers” (Rieger et al., 2023, p. 74), I believe it is necessary to tease out different roles’ distinct positionalities, as these influence the caring labor we perform. Both GSIs and other contingent faculty enact care work by planning engaging lessons, monitoring small-group work, responding to student writing, conferencing, advising students outside of class, making our pedagogy responsive to students’ needs, managing our emotions, and mentoring other instructors, and we do so under precarious conditions—a job description that requires working more than contracted, low pay, limited job security, a lack of benefits, and administrative surveillance. What sets GSIs apart, however, is our dual role as students and teachers.
GSIs’ student status can obfuscate our role as academic care workers. Many GSIs, especially those newer to graduate school, identify as students first and instructors second (Marburger, 2019). When I first started my MA, I viewed myself as a student taking classes and conducting research who had to teach as part of my program. It took years of graduate school (and joining my grad employee union) to understand the primacy of my teaching labor. After all, the “title of graduate student,” as Laura Bartlett (2003) tells us, obscures the fact that “the overwhelming majority of time spent in rhet-comp programs is devoted to pedagogical training and working as feminized contingent labor” (p. 271). If GSIs do not view themselves as workers, they may not account for how much un(der)paid care work they do. This is especially true because care work tends to be difficult to quantify and exceeds our job descriptions. Chatting with students outside of class, for example, may not seem like work, but something we do just because we care about our students. The nebulous nature of care also makes it so that teaching can easily seep into and supersede our other academic obligations. Unlike faculty in teaching-only positions, GSIs teach care-intensive writing courses while taking classes, completing exams, writing dissertations, publishing, and attending conferences. This double workload is especially significant considering Priest’s (2018) study, which revealed that GSIs spent most of their time on grading or responding to student writing—a form of care work.
As many GSIs hold out hope for a tenure-track position at the end of our studies, we are further compelled to engage in caring labor by the apprenticeship myth. Described by Allison Laubach Wright (2017), this narrative portrays GSIs “as apprentices who are the primary beneficiaries of their work in the academy” (p. 272). Because GSIs gain teaching experience through our assistantships, the story goes, we should work hard for little pay. Thinking toward securing future employment, we may, like more than half of writing instructors responding to Rieger et al.’s (2023) survey, feel pressured to “engag[e] in service without pay” (p. 90) to earn a line on our CV or impress our WPAs. We might go the extra mile and do “increased ‘care work’ in order to try to receive excellent course evaluations” (O’Donnell, 2019, p. 21) to stand out from our peers and help us secure a TT position. The problem, of course, is that those jobs are disappearing, such that graduate teaching seems less like an apprenticeship and more like plain contingent labor (Bousquet, 2002; Wright, 2017). However, the staying power of the apprenticeship myth suggests that if we work hard enough—if we do enough extra, un(der)paid care work—we have a shot at one of the good jobs.
Beyond GSIs’ own motivations for performing care work, our teacher-student positionality can make our students expect more care from us. Being students, many GSIs lack the authority that other contingent faculty can derive from their degrees. GSIs may be younger, and we tend to be less experienced teachers (Bousquet, 2002; Greene, 2021; Marburger, 2019). These factors can make GSIs seem more accessible than other faculty. When I started teaching writing, I was only 21 and had just received my BA. I told my students that I knew what it felt like to start school, having just done so myself, which led some of them to come to me for advice. More recently, I have had multiple students choose to interview me for a general education assignment because, they told me, I was their most approachable teacher. When students trust us, and when we do genuinely care about them, it can be challenging to limit how much we care. As one GSI, “Alex,” interviewed in Clem and Buyserie’s (2023) study puts it: “[A]s a grad instructor it can be difficult to say no to your own students” (p. 37). Our relative inexperience as teachers and the intense, competitive nature of graduate school may make it feel almost impossible to refuse extra care work.
However, while GSIs’ positionality as students intensifies the care work involved in teaching writing, it can also give us power to address this burden. Compared to other contingent faculty, many GSIs have greater job security in the form of “guaranteed funding” for the length of our programs (Greene, 2021, p. 53). As Beth Greene (2021) argues, our student status makes it “safer for us” to “fight for social justice in higher education,” because “we’re consumers before employees and have larger numbers, potentially giving us a better chance of being heard by administrators” (p. 56). Given many graduate programs’ aim of professionalization, GSIs have opportunities to work with our WPAs. In this way, we can leverage our student-worker status to identify and enact solutions to the exploitation of our caring labor.