This paper explores how doctoral students enrolled as Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) in UK universities develop their academic teaching practice and how their teaching development is enacted both socially and materially.

In European higher education (HE) contexts, roles similar to GTAs are often called teaching/student assistants, demonstrators, tutors, or monitors. Their responsibilities typically include teaching at the undergraduate level, grading assignments, providing student feedback, managing a course forum, or leading tutorials, seminars, and laboratory work. GTAs are vital in delivering undergraduate and postgraduate teaching – for instance, UK universities rely on hourly paid staff, such as GTAs, to deliver 25% to 50% of their undergraduate teaching (UCU, 2018). Employing PhD students as GTAs is a practice that has a number of potential advantages for institutions, being seen as a cost-effective measure that reduces the teaching workload on senior academics (Chadha, 2013), invests in fostering a new generation of faculty, and allows doctoral students to enhance their discipline-specific expertise (Barr & Wright, 2019) and increase employability in academia and the labour market (Rao et al., 2021).

However, navigating early academic teaching experiences is challenging (Alhija & Fresko, 2021), particularly for GTAs without a prior teaching background. They often face stress, anxiety, lack of self-confidence, and time pressures (Rao et al., 2021; Reeves et al., 2018). To prepare GTAs for their teaching roles and ensure a baseline level of teaching quality, numerous universities provide formal GTA training or informal peer-based support. However, these measures vary across and within universities, remaining “atomistic, serendipitous rather than holistic and structured” (Rao et al., 2021, p. 465).

Recent studies have evaluated institutional or subject-specific GTA support and training provision (Barr & Wright, 2019; Shum et al., 2021) and illuminated doctoral students’ experiences and reflections concerning the benefits and challenges of their GTA practice (Jordan & Howe, 2018; Rao et al., 2021). However, the full spectrum of factors contributing to GTA teaching development has been under-researched, and arguably, a more holistic approach is needed to examine GTA training and GTA work together.

This project addresses this gap by adopting a sociomaterial approach that focuses on how the constituent interactions among humans (social) and non-humans (material) produce specific practices that enact social reality. By taking “practice” as a unit of analysis (Moura & Bispo, 2020), sociomateriality illuminates the everyday materiality often overlooked in anthropocentric educational research, offering a deeper insight into messy and complex educational practices (MacLeod & Ajjawi, 2020).

This sociomaterial study employs Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which claims that human and non-human actors have an equivalent (or symmetrical) capacity to exert agency (Latour, 2005). ANT views educational practices as fluid and contingent actor-networks that come into being through translation (Callon, 1986), producing relational network effects such as knowledge, identity, power, development, or experience (Law & Hassard, 2007). ANT provides a robust framework and a methodological toolbox to trace how dynamic webs of heterogeneous actors translate (or not) into GTA teaching development.

Hence, this paper seeks to address the following research questions:

• RQ1. How is GTA teaching development experienced and practised?
• RQ2. What sociomaterial (f)actors contribute to the teaching development of GTAs, and how are those interrelated?

The findings of this UK-based project may offer insights that can inform policies and practices to enhance doctoral students’ teaching development practices and academic acculturation within diverse European HE contexts, especially as they navigate the European Universities Initiative and the ongoing trends of massification, internationalisation, and student mobility of higher education.

To “follow the actors themselves” (Latour, 2005, p. 12) and let them speak for themselves, ANT-based research typically adopts ethnomethodology (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). This study followed the actors to trace how the existing sociomaterial practices of GTA training and teaching assistance work materialised both in physical and virtual spaces and translated (or not) into GTA teaching development. Additionally, to chart the development across time, the research design took a longitudinal approach spanning one academic year and employed a variety of ethnographic qualitative research methods, such as 1) participant diaries, 2) participant mapping interviews, 3) observations, and 4) an autoethnographic reflective journal. The GTA participants (central human actors) were recruited from two distinct UK universities to allow a comparative analysis of how broader contextual and institutional (f)actors affect GTA teaching development. Due to the longitudinal nature of the research, the diverse range of methods employed, and the significant expected participant workload, the sample for this qualitative study was relatively small - six GTAs (N=6) from different disciplines. Throughout the study, the GTAs were asked to log diary entries based on significant (positive and negative) events, interactions and activities in their learning-to-teach journey. The diary prompts offered participants to share their observations, feelings, and meanings - via text, imagery, or short audio/video recordings. During a series of three conversational semi-structured interviews, participants were invited to draw (or amend) an individual mind map of all the people and things with which/whom they have been interacting weekly to pin down the social and material (f)actors of their GTA training and teaching assistant experiences (Fenwick & Nimmo, 2015). Observations of face-to-face and online participant interactions complemented the interviews and diaries and helped triangulate the generated data. Finally, in sociomaterial studies, the researcher is a part of the studied network (MacLeod & Ajjawi, 2020), and an autoethnographic reflective journal helped contextualise and extend the data captured through interviews, diaries, and observations. As this study is a work-in-progress, all data is expected to be analysed using visual network analysis (VNA) (Decuypere, 2020) and represented in an actor-network diagram to highlight the breadth and interconnectedness of contributing (f)actors. The diversity of research methods is expected to elicit thick descriptions and link rich data across geographical spaces and times, offering a more nuanced and holistic perspective of “experiencing” and “practising” GTA teaching development.

This exploratory study aims to provide new insights into how UK doctoral students enrolled as GTAs learn to teach and how interconnected social and material (f)actors contribute to this development. By adopting the ANT ontological stance, the research traces how the associations of human and non-human (f)actors - such as GTA training content, institutional policies, elements of digital platforms, classroom settings, or peer networks - shape the experiences of GTAs in their professional journey through GTA training and GTA work. As doctoral students transition into GTAs, they navigate different teaching identities - GTA-to-be, GTA learner, and GTA practitioner - effects of dynamic heterogeneous actor-networks at hand. The findings may suggest that teaching development is a non-linear, complex, networked, and materially embedded process, where the teaching background, interests in teaching, academic practice, and training are inseparably linked. Consequently, this study advocates for more structured, adequate, and holistic support for GTAs, which can potentially inform the practices of GTA training and work and guide institutional or department-level policymaking across European higher education institutions. Additionally, this paper contributes to the overlooked post-humanist perspective on academic teaching development, offering an extension and critical appraisal of concepts and the suitability of ANT in higher education research. Additionally, as the application of VNA and ANT is underexplored in the academic literature, the visual illustration of findings through VNA can serve as an innovative methodological approach, allowing for a more holistic way to reveal structural patterns and elicit the missing areas in GTA learning-to-teach journeys. Ultimately, this work aspires to advance both theoretical understanding and practical strategies for supporting GTAs, ensuring their teaching development is better integrated, supported, and valued within the wider academic landscape.

Alhija, F. N.-A., & Fresko, B. (2021). Challenges of being a graduate teaching assistant. Higher Education Research & Development, 40(6), 1220–1235. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2020.1806790 Barr, M., & Wright, P. (2019). Training graduate teaching assistants: What can the discipline offer? European Political Science, 18(1), 143–156. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-018-0175-6 Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. The Sociological Review, 32(1), 196–233. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1984.tb00113.x Chadha, D. (2013). Reconceptualising and reframing graduate teaching assistant (GTA) provision for a research-intensive institution. Teaching in Higher Education, 18(2), 205–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2012.696537 Decuypere, M. (2020). Visual Network Analysis: a qualitative method for researching sociomaterial practice. Qualitative Research, 20(1), 73–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794118816613 Fenwick, T., & Edwards, R. (2010). Actor-network theory in education. Routledge. Fenwick, T., & Nimmo, G. R. (2015). Making visible what matters: Sociomaterial approaches for research and practice in healthcare education. Researching Medical Education, 67–80. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118838983.ch7 Jordan, K., & Howe, C. (2018). The perceived benefits and problems associated with teaching activities undertaken by doctoral students. Teaching in Higher Education, 23(4), 504–521. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2017.1414787 Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press. Law, J., & Hassard, J. (Eds.). (2007). Actor network theory and after (1. publ., repr). Blackwell. MacLeod, A., & Ajjawi, R. (2020). Thinking Sociomaterially: Why Matter Matters in Medical Education. Academic Medicine, 95(6), 851–855. https://doi.org/10.1097/acm.0000000000003143 Moura, E. O. de, & Bispo, M. de S. (2020). Sociomateriality: Theories, methodology, and practice. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences / Revue Canadienne Des Sciences de l’Administration, 37(3), 350–365. https://doi.org/10.1002/cjas.1548 Rao, N., Hosein, A., & Raaper, R. (2021). Doctoral students navigating the borderlands of academic teaching in an era of precarity. Teaching in Higher Education, 26(3), 454–470. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1892058 Reeves, T. D., Hake, L. E., Chen, X., Frederick, J., Rudenga, K., Ludlow, L. H., & O’Connor, C. M. (2018). Does Context Matter? Convergent and Divergent Findings in the Cross-Institutional Evaluation of Graduate Teaching Assistant Professional Development Programs. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 17(1), ar8. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-03-0044 Shum, A., Lau, P., & Fryer, L. (2021). From learner to teacher: (re)training graduate teaching assistants’ teaching approaches and developing self-efficacy for and interest in teaching. Higher Education Research & Development, 40(7), 1546–1563. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2020.1818063 UCU. (2018). Precarious education: how much university teaching is being delivered by hourly-paid academics? University and College Union. https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/9258/uni-teaching-by-hp-staff-march-2018/pdf/uniteachingbyhpstaffmarch