Conference Program

Across UK higher education, Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) are increasingly being relied upon to carry out teaching responsibilities (Quirke & Standen, 2024), comprising seminar leading, lab demonstrating, and marking and feedback. While the dual nature of their role (as doctoral candidates that teach) can offer great insight and opportunity for advancing their career prospects, their liminality can create challenges with precarity, perceived competence, and understanding the expectations and responsibilities of GTAs (Zotos, Moon & Shultz, 2020). This can be problematic as they navigate identifying as student and staff simultaneously and grapple with institutional training to enhance preparedness for teaching (Corrales & Komperda, 2022; Brock et al., 2024).

This study of GTAs at a Russell Group university seeks to understand how the GTA role shapes career aspirations. Earlier studies indicate that the GTAs’ liminality has situated them in third space, assigning a ‘blended professional’ identity, owing to their movement between academic and administrative roles (Campbell, 2024). Based on this, and the heterogeneity of GTAs, to understand the types of work they fulfil within HE and the influence of this work, a new model of analysis is required (Feng, 2024). Distinct features of the GTA reality and their aspirations are known to be informed by personal background, disciplinary expertise, and their job expectations, as well as their involvement with teaching, research, and service. Hence, by acknowledging this information, institutions may be better placed to develop support and training that not only accommodates difference but uses these subjectivities as a starting point when helping to pave career paths into academia.

Feng’s (2024) three-dimensional space model is a good fit for the current study as it illustrates GTA positioning regarding the three core functions of higher education – teaching, research, and service. Teaching encompasses student instruction and staff training; research represents disciplinary and institutional research; and service captures the general and professional activities essential to sustaining university operations. These three axis points reveal how GTAs define their work, and indeed how their involvement in these tasks inform their career trajectories, if at all. This conceptualisation provides a framework for analysing GTAs’ expectations, experiences, and career aspirations within the academic field and offers insight into how they navigate their professional identities in higher education.

From the data, various implications for higher education are offered. In the first instance, issues with GTA mentorship and supervisionarise as a lack of consistent support is revealed across participant experiences. This indicates that there may be a need for those working with or supporting GTAs to undergo training that addresses the challenges of their unique role. Where training is concerned, the authors consider what additional CPD could be offered to anchor GTAs more firmly in the institution during their contracted employment, and what would also give them a competitive edge thereafter. GTAs are often the GTA’s greatest resource, as they share strategies for teaching, and whether challenges together – so, how can they be supported to know one another better as peers, not least as prospective colleagues in the academy?