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Graduate student-instructors embody a fundamental precarity in the university system. We’re often exploited and overworked as well as expected to be grateful for the chance to work in academia. Though we serve a critical role in staffing introductory level courses at many universities as we prepare for careers in and beyond the academy, our labor as graduate student-instructors often becomes invisible, as the result of the compounding impacts of university or department budgets, our (in)dispensability, and our identities. For example, first-year writing (FYW)—often one of the first classes undergraduate students enroll in–is an essential service, “[cultivating] and [supporting] students’ sense of belonging” as well as improving student performance and retention (Flood, 2020, para. 1), which is frequently offered to graduate students for assistantships across writing and rhetoric departments and university contexts. However, even as graduate students provide essential labor, such as teaching FYW and other service courses, our status as students and teachers is constantly in flux–keeping us in an often precarious, unstable state.
The precarity that graduate student-instructors experience is further complicated when we consider the tensions between being a student and an instructor. We are often charged with preparing our students to think critically and engage with the world while in our classrooms and beyond (Agboka, 2018; Katz, 1992; Simmons & Grabill, 2007). The classroom is not a separate microcosm from the “real world,” and we must consider how to broach both “practical” knowledge and theory to prepare our students for tackling wicked problems (Carlson, 2021). Yet our status as graduate students–and therefore learners–is emphasized; we must be “experts” for our students, who may only be a few years younger than we are, yet are also framed as inexperienced learners working within the constraints of a broader system. As new laws and discourses develop and constrain classrooms and campuses, our lack of formal protections, such as those of tenure or other benefits full-time, non-tenure track faculty may receive, aggravate our precarity–especially student-instructors of color or other minoritized identities.
As graduate student-instructors of writing courses, we recognize that our positionality allows us to resist institutions in coalition (Chavez, 2011; Haywood, 2019; Pritchard, 2019) with our students. Because coalitions may be “temporary and goal oriented” and are designed for “certain kinds of action” (Chavez, 2013, p. 24), this labor may take on a variety of forms, depending on an institution's structure, a department’s policies, and student-instructors' pedagogies. And still, we must acknowledge that graduate student-instructors are sometimes complicit in oppressive classrooms or harm in higher education broadly (as our examples below illustrate). However, institutional structures or department policies offer us some protection, too. For example, if a student emails the chair and says an instructor isn’t grading on time, referring to a syllabus can be a form of protection. As early career scholar-teachers, shouldn’t we want protection–especially when we’re still learning and our teacher identities are “in process” (Restaino, 2012)?
We argue that graduate students as learner-teachers are uniquely able to stand at the precipice of tactically transgressive teaching, at the boundaries of an in-between in ways that full-time faculty may not. Solidarity underpins these coalitions and commitments to social justice in ways that graduate student-instructors must attend precisely because, as fellow students, we work within the same neoliberal university system as our students. While we remain at risk of being harmed by these systems in similar ways to undergraduate students, our looking glass is only peculiar because it lets us see these risks and problems as both enforcers and subjects. That said, keeping an eye on each of our roles lets us see the gaps between these roles, in order to go beyond mere invitation and subvert dominant narratives enough to create a transgressive classroom.
Following hooks (1994), we identify the classroom not only as a communal space but also a space where injustice and oppression reproduce themselves, if unaddressed. Given the social justice turn in technical and professional communication, the inclusion of social justice and ethics to scholarship and syllabi over the past couple decades enables the classroom hooks’ (1994) describes and the workplace to imbricate. In our view, education should subvert the neoliberal approach that universities and courses seem to pursue; thus, as scholars interested in social justice, we seek to transgress these norms that reproduce such oppression with, instead, a more nuanced attention to criticality. We believe that student-instructors are uniquely positioned to resist the neoliberal atomization of education as job training without intentional attention to social and ethical impact–yet we remain agents of the institution. There exists a simultaneous power in our precarity, as graduate student-instructors are afforded the distinctive student-instructor positionality.
In this article, we contend with the following questions: What affordances and constraints do graduate student-instructors face in enacting social justice-oriented practices through our classrooms and pedagogies? How can graduate student-instructors act tactically in the classroom and, thus, agitate for change when constrained by the neoliberal university and the exploitation of graduate student labor? How might building coalitions with students as student-instructors generate student empowerment in the academy and beyond? We consider these questions through social justice technical communication (Walton, Moore, & Jones, 2019) and tactical technical communication (Kimball, 2017) in order to provide a reflexive teaching framework that provides graduate student-instructors opportunities to develop transgressive teaching classrooms.
We explore these questions in the following narratives. Alex’s narrative comes from his experience teaching first year writing, while Nicole’s narrative draws from her time teaching both first year writing and an upper-level writing center course. These experiences were foundational to our development as pedagogues and scholar-teachers concerned with social justice. By analyzing these narratives, we propose that our complex and precarious positionality does not foreclose the possibility of social justice in our classrooms, even when we are faced with institutional constraints on how and what we teach. Although graduate student-instructors may be expected to meet the demands of the university and maintain good standing, we seek to step back and examine our positionalities and experiences in order to consider tactically transgressive teaching.