Hi everyone! My name is Cole Klassen and my pronouns are they/them. I’ve been working as the TA Training Coordinator for just over a month now and, as I prepare training for the fall, an idea that seems to keep appearing again and again is the difficult balance of authenticity and professionalism required of TAs.
By authenticity, I mean communication that makes students feel cared for, excited, and part of a community; when fully authentic, you seem to students like an honest person who cares about them.
By professionalism, I mean communication that shows students you are an authority; when fully professional, even if you are nice, there is still a boundary that keeps the student/TA relationship from becoming something too personal like a friendship.
Since both of these approaches are really important in TAing, it can be a hard balance…Professionalism without authenticity leads to students feeling like their education is just a product they are paying for, which kills community and excitement. However, authenticity without professionalism leads to a lack of boundaries; then, the TA’s relationship with some students becomes like friendship, which can lead to favouring some students over others.
This balance is important in all teaching-related jobs, and is probably a component of every customer/patron/student service job. Yet, how TAs experience this balance is unique. For many TAs, this is their first time serving directly as an educator. Additionally, since TAs are generally working with large classes in which the instructor doesn’t have the capacity to work personally with each student and build community, there is a lot of pressure on TAs to do so. No one wants to be that “bad TA in a massive hundreds-of-people class” that everyone complains about.
Additionally, like all fine arts, creative writing involves a heightened level of vulnerability and emotion compared to more empirical disciplines. Most students take creative writing courses because they want a break from the employment-focused parts of schooling. Even if a student in CRWR 200 hopes to make a living teaching creative writing one day, their main motivation for taking creative writing isn’t to make money—it’s an excitement for writing. This craving for the authentic side of things—art, emotion, community, excitement—puts unique and sometimes paradoxical pressures on TAs. For instance, although the alluring part of creative writing is its more artsy side, students aren’t sure how the inevitable empirical facets of our current education system—namely grading—can fit into something as emotional and subjective as art. Consequently, creative writing students want their TAs to do completely opposite things. They are anxious that their TAs will be too professional and cold at the same time that they are anxious their TAs won’t be professional enough to be objective in grading.
I don’t have the answer to completely finding this difficult balance. I think that everyone approaches this in their own unique way. Also, simply being aware of the importance of this balance within every level of TAing is maybe the most crucial step. Anyways, even if I don’t have the complete answer, I can still share a few ideas and methods that I’ve found useful!
One thing I’ve found really useful is to pay attention to my favourite instructors. We all have a few instructors we love who manage to build community and make us very excited while simultaneously being very professional. These instructors show us that it’s possible to have a class that is fair and involves firm rules and boundaries, yet still feels very personal and exciting. Pay attention to the kind of language these favourite instructors of yours use when talking to students: the language they use when building excitement, the language they use when laying down rules. If you feel that your rule-enforcing is too strict or your feedback is overly critical, pay attention to how your favourite instructor fosters excitement and enforces boundaries in a way that doesn’t feel alienating. If you feel that you aren’t being firm enough with rules or you are spending hours and hours crafting elaborate and encouraging feedback, pay attention to how your favourite instructor’s feedback manages to be efficient without becoming impersonal. Directly asking your favourite instructor how they do it via email isn’t a bad idea either!
A valuable idea here is fairness; it’s an idea I find myself coming back to again and again when thinking about this balance. For instance, if you are burning out because you are spending too long creating deeply encouraging and sensitive feedback, you are not being fair to yourself! When you have good intentions, it can be hard to realize you are giving too much of yourself. And even if it seems like burning yourself out is helping students in this situation, the truth is that it’s impossible to keep burnout from affecting those around you. For instance, if you’re spending 30 minutes on feedback for each submission, you’re going to be pretty worn out by the time you’ve completed 25/50 submissions. Inevitably, the final 25 submissions will receive less considerate and measured feedback. This is an example of how being unfair toward any party in the equation is going to cause an imbalance—even if that party is you and it seems like you’re being helpful!
Every TA is going to run into some sort of imbalance like this—it’s natural. As I continue to work on training materials, I’m going to keep thinking about this difficult balance between authenticity and professionalism. Hearing about every TA’s experience with this—their struggles, solutions, and philosophies—is probably the best educational tool when it comes to a broad issue like this. Hopefully we can have some fruitful group discussion in the coming year! Even though it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem, I hope this blog post helps as you develop or reinforce your own ways to balance authenticity and professionalism as an educator.