Exploring the sociomaterial practices of graduate teaching assistant development through actor-network theory: An autoethnographic study

Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) are essential to UK higher education, supporting both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. While teaching provides doctoral students with developmental opportunities, navigating initial teaching experiences and developing teaching capacity can be challenging, especially when the institutional teaching support for GTAs is fragmented or inaccessible. This reflective essay employs Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as an analytical lens to explore how GTA development is enacted socially and materially. ANT conceptualises development not as an individual linear process but as a result of dynamic networked interactions among both human (social) and non-human (material) actors. Drawing on autoethnographic journal data from one academic year at a research-intensive UK university, I analyse how my prior teaching experience and particular personal and institutional sociomaterial practices supported or limited my teaching development through three overlapping identities: GTA-to-be, GTA learner, and GTA practitioner. The study discusses how poor communication and low transparency regarding departmental teaching opportunities, lack of access to GTA training, ignorance of GTAs’ prior teaching experiences, and insufficient remunerated workload allocation can discourage GTAs and disrupt the development of teaching capacities. At the same time, peer networks, instructional role-modelling during GTA training, and flexible and diverse GTA work can contribute to a teaching identity and enable further teaching development. This reflective essay demonstrates how sociomaterial approaches can elicit the materiality and less visible nuances of GTA development and offer actionable recommendations to improve institutional teaching support while contributing to the ongoing discussions about the professional development of GTAs.