First perusal: isolation

Isolation, whether total or only at specific moments, remains for now a persistent theme in the graduate student TA experience. My hunch is that emphasis on efficiency, expertise, and disciplinary knowledge, along with the TA work conditions (short-term contracts within a departmental structure allowing the university to function more cheaply with larger class sizes) give rise to isolation by exacerbating anxieties related to the "impostor syndrome" (where TAs feel they do not have what it takes to be doing what they're asked to do).

TA programs that justify themselves as compensating for a lack of skill, experience, knowledge, practice or capacity on the part of TAs, thereby undervalue graduate students' existing capacities for self-direction. Caught within the rhetoric around enhancing the quality of undergraduate education, many programs do not fully take advantage of the opportunity for building graduate students' autonomy in the TA role. Instead, the peer relations that form through these TA development programs become an accidental side-effect, a bonus to the assumed "meat" of the program, rather than an intentional centre-piece in combating isolation and supporting skill development.

An initial perusal of the literature on TA development confirms a tendency towards providing solutions about how to be a more efficient TA, often within a specific disciplinary context. While there is a place for efficiency and disciplinary or departmental standards, when these become the imaginary bar that TAs have to jump, then the actual pedagogical potential of the TA role is partially neutralized, since the TA's own unique capacities and experiences are seen as marginal, and therefore may be stunted. By contrast, there is other literature that suggests that peer relations among TAs can play a central role not only in reducing the negative effects of isolation but also in supporting a fuller development of graduate student autonomous capacities. The challenge is to create the conditions in which TAs are supported in the development of their own capacities