Class Act: Reflections on a working-class academic sense of self as a Graduate Teaching Assistant

This article provides insights into the social class position of Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTA) in UK Higher Education. It does so through reflecting on the author’s experiences of teaching undergraduate students as a GTA. Variously described as ‘the donkey in the department’ and ‘peacekeepers’ in neoliberalised universities, GTAs perform a crucial teaching role in many academic departments. Currently missing from this scholarship is the consideration of what it means to be a working-class GTA. Whilst work on GTAs continues to grow, there remains an absence of working-class voices in postgraduate pedagogies. This paper then, reflects on what this future research might look like for those straddling these boundaries between student and academic, working-class and middle-class. To do so, it will go beyond the existing GTA scholarship to explore more broadly what it means to be a working-class academic and working-class student. This article will reflect on the tensions involved in tenuously identifying and ‘performing’ as both an academic and working-class. It will also examine the positive aspects brought to the classroom by the GTA’s ‘liminal’ class position such as so-called ‘approachability’, and what the impacts of the job are on the production of working-class academic ‘selfhood’. In doing so, the paper’s main argument is that the GTA role is one through which working-class PhD students can successfully ‘become’ academics and develop a confident academic sense of self.