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Journal for Research and Practice in College Teaching 2021, Volume 6, Number 2
http://journals.uc.edu
Being Human:
A Reflection of an International Graduate Teaching Assistant (IGTA)
Thir B. Budhathoki
The University of Arizona
When I came to the US in fall 2017 as an international graduate student and started
teaching First-Year Writing (FYW) as an IGTA, I had to learn how to use the D2L learning
management system, Google features, and online materials on the web and university library for
instructional purposes. Although these technologies had posed significant challenges to me at
first, the on-site classes had their own dynamics. For one, I did not have to solely rely on those
technologies. Besides, the students always offered to help me sort out any tech issues we had in
the class. It saved me from a lot of stress. In the next couple of years, I learned whatever I needed
to teach an onsite class where I prioritized class discussions about the assignments and readings,
group and peer work for invention and review, and opportunities for students to do some
writings in the class. But then came the COVID pandemic, and we couldn’t return to campus after
the spring break of 2020. Overnight, I lost all the affordances of the physical classroom and had
to totally rely on my laptop to complete the remainder of the course. It was quite a change. I had
to reimagine the entire course content in an online context and make it manageable for me as
well as my students. To me as a student of rhetoric and composition, it was a most practical
challenge and opportunity to test how I would navigate the new rhetorical situation we all were
forced into by the pandemic. Besides, I was taking my comprehensive exams.
As the days and weeks passed, the pandemic continued to shatter my naive hope for
returning to normal sometime soon. Instead, I got addicted to doomscrolling and developed new
obsessive habits of cleanliness. Living alone in a studio apartment 8000 miles away from home, I
had to cope with a range of conflicting emotions every single day: frustration over the lost
freedom, the cancelled trip home in the summer, and all the challenges and complexities of
online instruction on one hand, and a sense of privilege and gratitude for being able to work
safely from home, learn about new technologies, and focus on my academic work on the other.
In retrospect, I feel that those days of agonizing uncertainty and discomfort helped me develop
a more nuanced approach to and understanding of teaching and learning.
The faculty and staff of the Writing Program and Office of Instruction and Assessment did
what they could to help instructors navigate the new mode of teaching. But no amount of support
would suffice for me to turn my course to fully asynchronous online in less than two weeks. So I
decided to do what I could. I realized that I hadn’t used some of the D2L features like
“Announcements” much. For the remainder of spring 2020, I relied on D2L announcements to
share all course related information, emails and Zoom/phone conferences for more
individualized communication with the students, and I expanded the role of Google Drive as a
shared workspace for individual as well as collaborative work, including reviews and feedback.
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These technologies became my savior at that moment because I didn’t have to learn from the
beginning.
In the following summer, I took a course on online teaching, and the Writing Program also
prepared pre-designed courses for first-time online instructors. These courses allowed me to
focus on the delivery without having to build the course from scratch. But a total lack of physical
contact once again made me think about how I would deliver the content and how students
would receive it in the way I had never done before. I reexamined the clarity and efficacy of my
personal communication practices. Although I was used to talking about rhetorical situations
where the audience is an integral part, now I had real issues like students totally lost about the
assignment, others assuming a different deadline, and still some others unaware of where to turn
in the assignment despite its clear mention on the assignment prompt. I couldn’t miss the
occasions to clarify such things in the classroom more so, instead, I tried to make do with online
communication where walking a fine line between giving adequate information to the students
and not overwhelming them became yet another challenge.
I continued to learn more about the technologies. I learned to make and edit videos and
add captioning to make them more accessible. I learned more efficient ways to use Zoom for
group and individual conferences and Google Drive for productive collaboration. These
technologies worked well with some exceptions, and I will continue to use them to the extent
they fit in the on-site classes. For example, I will continue to hold some of the office hour
meetings and scheduled one-on-one conferences with the students on Zoom to make them
convenient for both of us. Likewise, collaborative work on Google Drive will continue to be a part
of my on-site pedagogy. But more importantly, this experience helped me identify some of my
assumptions and blind spots. Coming from a developing country, I had an assumption that
everyone in the US has access to computers and the internet, but I saw some of my students
working on their cell phones or sharing the computer with other family members, or not having
a strong internet connection to complete the assignments. There were others juggling family
responsibilities, work, and health issues on top of their studies. I realized why it is important to
hold our judgment for a while, look at each student’s situation individually, and be a little more
lenient and accommodating to their needs. In fact, I had quite a few students who would have
dropped or ‘failed’ the class if I hadn’t offered them additional time and support. I also learned
to question a seemingly innocuous assumption like “these young kids are always better at
technology” when some of my students constantly struggled to share the Google doc allowing
comment or edit access to the readers. Before the pandemic I would rarely have questioned the
technical acumen of my Gen Z students but now I will be more particular about such issues even
at the risk of appearing redundant to some of my students and approach each situation on an
individual basis.
With a dual role of a student and an instructor in a different country I was already in what
Gloria Anzaldua (2012) would call the borderlands where confusion and contradictions give
intense pain but offer creative possibilities as well. On a personal level, the experience of
switching back to student life after a long gap and leaving my family behind initially due to the
fear of visa denial and lack of health insurance coverage and later due to the pandemic was a lot
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to handle. On the professional front, my positionality as an IGTA who, as Tao Zhang argues, are
“trapped by invisible forces in difficult pedagogical relationships and the subsequent emotional
drain while working late nights to catch up with necessary work” (2020, p. 11) further
complicated my already complex life in solitude. But nevertheless I tried my best to stay positive
throughout those tumultuous days and months albeit not without failures. While Zhang’s
representation of an IGTA’s professional and emotional upheavals best reflects my experiences
so far, it is Anzaldua’s theorization of borderland and its potentials that give me hope and energy
to navigate my path ahead. It encourages me to be more inclusive and accepting of the
inconsistencies and ambiguities, and therefore more human. As much as my self-reflection as an
IGTA navigating a new territory helped me relate to what the students felt as they had to move
into the unfamiliar terrain of online learning, Anzaldua’s projection of the inevitability of
contradiction through the figure of Coatlique, “the Earth Mother . . . the incarnation of cosmic
processes” representing “duality in life, a synthesis, and a third perspective” (2012, p. 68) all at
the same time created a new empathy in me for my students’ online struggles. In the final
analysis, more than the lessons about technologies that are bound to change in less than a year,
my realization that I must question my assumptions and try to be more humane without
compromising my integrity as a teacher will stick to me forever regardless of where and who I
teach in the future.
References
Anzaldua, G. (2012). Borderlands/ La frontera: The new mestiza (4th ed.). Aunt Lute Books.
Zhang, T. (2020). ‘Your English is accented!’: Surviving with otherness while approaching positive
becoming. International Review of Qualitative Research, 1-21.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1940844720943510
.