‘Restor(y)ing their position in the spotlight, please welcome back on stage… Postgraduate Students who teach… or Graduate Teaching Assistants... or Teaching Postgrads… or…’
This is the story of the experiences of eleven postgraduate research students who
teach within the Institute of Technology (IoT) sector in Ireland. Despite being
present within the university sector, both nationally and internationally, the
concept of teaching postgraduates, within the IoT sector, is a relatively recent one,
and to date, very little research has been conducted into their experiences. They
have been on stage, but not centre stage…they have supported from the wings.
Adopting a narrative approach, this research presents the stories of these
postgraduate students and shines a spotlight on their occupational positioning and
identity within the sector. Underpinned by a poststructuralist stance, which sets
out to deconstruct existing structures, the study problematizes the concept of
Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) and explores the many different challenges
that face teaching postgraduate students within the sector, as voiced by the
postgraduate students themselves. Guided by a Foucauldian theorisation, that
suggests power can be pervasive and capillary, the study highlights how threads
of power are interwoven throughout the entire GTA experience, but also shows
how there is agentic power within the postgraduates themselves. The study also
considers how these teaching positions are being shaped by the impact of
neoliberalism within higher education and how their emergence has gone hand
in-hand with cost-saving measures and efficiencies.
But just as narrative may be viewed as a messy form of methodological inquiry
(Connolly, 2007) and poststructuralism favours a deconstructed form, this study
is also presented using a non-traditional format. Rather than following a conventional writing style, this study embraces performative writing as a means
of exploring different ways of knowing. The performative nature of the study is
a way of drawing explicit attention to the artificiality of conventional academic
writing and highlights the importance of writing as inquiry in itself. In addition,
through the adoption of performative writing in this study, a space has been
created for the reader to create their own meaning and to explore gaps in
knowledge.
The eleven individual stories are peppered throughout the study, as a way of
indicating that the postgraduate students are omnipresent throughout, just as they
are within higher education institutions. But You will also see that this study is
continuously interrupted by Celisne, who acts as a disruptive discursive
companion, and represents the many subjectivities of those who have been part of
this study, thereby inviting You to consider the multiple interpretations of this
story.
Finally, this study also makes claims to knowledge from a pedagogical
perspective, in that it has impacted upon my own pedagogy and practice, making
me more cognisant of the importance of involving all learners, including
postgrads who teach, in their own learning, listening to them, and ‘learning with’
them, rather than ‘teaching to’ them