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Introduction
When I accepted an offer to a master’s program in English, though I knew that the graduate teaching assistant (GTA) assignment was a mandatory and inevitable part of the assistantship, my main strategy was, candidly, to pretend that I would not in fact be in front of the classroom in just one year’s time. I was creeping back into the academic world after five years in student affairs, and was used to operating, even decentering, myself in favor of providing service and experience to the tens of thousands of students under our division umbrella. I was not student-facing in my position. The idea of teaching was intimidating at best and terrifying at worst, partially because in my prior role, I had a degree of anonymity. At this point, I still had a foot in the closet, though my partner and I were celebrating over ten years together. But I had never publicly identified myself as a lesbian, or even queer. However, my own sexuality was not the primary reason I was so concerned, though it certainly did not help. My impressions of what it meant to teach writing were flush with assumptive dread: I imagined that I would be required to teach strict grammar protocols, that I would need to subjectively assign numerical grades to assignments I did not have any expertise or interest in, that I would become the cliché of the underprepared, ineffective college instructor teaching a subject that my students did not want to learn and did not care about. I was prepared to take on teaching as a survival mechanism, something to grit my teeth through in order to get to the other side of the degree.
I recognize that this paints a grim picture of my earliest foray into the role of graduate instructor of writing. I illustrate this early memory of identity formation not because I wish to lament those first recollections, rather because I want to recognize the precarity and uncertainty that is so deeply entwined with the experience of being a graduate student in front of the classroom (Howard-Hill, 2023). If you were to approach me today, four years later, I would introduce myself as someone who loves the art and science of teaching. Someone who recognizes that my instructor-hood is an essential and inextricable part of my identity. Yet, I would also readily tell you that the process of ownership and claiming of that identity was fraught, deeply difficult mentally and spiritually, and required thorough remaking of my perceptions and assumptions about the classroom, the field, and my own positionality. At the time, I feared the breadth of the field, what I didn’t know, and the expertise I definitely did not have. Now, I see that breadth as part of what makes this field, and teaching in this field, so special: the heterogeneity of teaching first-year writing holds more power than I could have anticipated.
In short, it was more difficult than I anticipated to find myself in the classroom, and my struggle in the process of learning to teach was not unique to me in my program. I was lucky, in some ways, to have found the magic I did in teaching. Some around me were not so lucky. And so, I call on programs, and mentors, of GTAs in first-year writing to think through how identity in the classroom can be encouraged and fostered---but more importantly, I ask how we might be sensitive to those GTAs whose identities are still evolving, even fraught, and how we might frame the classroom as a place of (un)growth.
In forming my identity as an instructor, I ended up inadvertently entering a process that might be called (un)growth: in essence, un-learning my assumptions, un-learning my hesitations, un-learning my fears in favor of embracing becoming. This process was unintentionally tracked, accidentally archived, in assignments from classes, but also scrawls in notebooks, jotted down scholar names on dog-eared pieces of paper to look up later, early drafts of syllabi and assignments that represent a found-ecology of (un)growth. As graduate students, we’re in a constant state of becoming, somehow trying to embrace an eternal beginner’s mindset while meeting external expectations of rapid matriculation into expertise. Though I’m still not fully settled in my identity as a teacher, looking back over the work I was doing, where my mind was dwelling, what I was considering as I was learning to teach allowed me to design a coding strategy where I could see, even in my obvious uncertainty and confusion in this archive of work, snippets of what I cared about, and what I valued, as an instructor.
As Cicchino (2020) notes, approaches to teaching graduate students to teach writing vary widely. As a larger discipline, the conversation around teaching writing, and teaching others (especially graduate students) to teach writing, let alone how we do so with stewardship to graduate student experiences, care for undergraduate student success, and without entirely eviscerating the already overly scheduled life of the WPA or professor charged with disseminating this information in too little time, is, naturally---complicated. Thus, I understand that in asking for more attention to identity, and more consideration to those in marginalized positions, the natural reaction might be to say we wish we could, but we have little to no extra capacity to do so. In this piece, I’m not necessarily arguing that more time needs to be devoted to teacher training, or that the curriculums of GTA education need full overhauls. Rather, the existing conversation around teacher training can always, and, especially in the continuously fraught picture of higher education, should always be challenged to think through how we can ask graduate students to do the work of forming a teaching identity.
At my university, a large R1 with over 100 sections of first-year writing per semester, our approach to GTA education has seen several revisions, even in my time as a graduate student. In my era of first learning to teach, we all took a mandatory pedagogy course, tutored in the writing center for our first year, observed a section with an experienced instructor, and in our second year of the two-year program, taught independently with a supportive practicum course each semester. As a PhD student now, I teach two sections each semester independently. My university has a robust teacher training program, one I am grateful for, and I recognize that this is not the case in every institution. My hope for this reflective work is that it speaks to other GTAs who might connect with my experience, regardless of whether they are in an intensive teacher training program, or find themselves going through the process very much alone. In this piece, I share an autoethnographic mapping of (un)growth as an instructor and graduate student: each archival snippet a glimpse into a pedagogical evolution, that I have paired with practicable strategies for graduate students who may be interested in teaching outside the lines of convention in favor of the radical world of boldly queer pedagogy. Whether the reader is early in their teaching journey, or nearing the end of their graduate tenure, these vignettes are designed for applicability, and, more critically, as an offering for those who might feel isolated, lost, or otherwise uncertain in the classroom.