The Role of Identity in Understanding Graduate Teaching Assistants: A Mixed Methods Analysis

摘要

Despite widespread reliance on Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) in higher education, little is known about their identity as teachers and motivation toward teaching. To begin closing this gap, we conducted a sequential mixed methods study focused on GTAs in large first-year engineering programs. Our goal was to establish profiles of current GTAs based on key features of identity and motivation. Our analysis yielded three teaching identity profiles: strong, transitional, and weak. The data reveal that motivation constructs matter to GTAs individually but perhaps do not contribute to profiles. A key finding was that identity is the strongest driver of clustering and grouping across the quantitative and qualitative data. We describe potential implications of current teaching development practices for GTAs in each profile.