The Power of Silence: Anxiety and Autonomy in TA Labor

When I took on increasing responsibilities within my university's pedagogical training programs during the pandemic, I expected an increase in collaboration and pedagogical discussion because of the difficult teaching circumstances. Instead, I came to see a silence that kept teaching assistants (TAs) from talking about their labor process either with their instructors or with fellow TAs. In this paper, I theorize this silence both as a defense against anxiety and as protecting autonomy. I draw on my own experiences as a TA, my work as a pedagogy instructor in my department and for the university, and an ethnography of working TAs to investigate how TAs leverage their silence to strategically manage multiple competing interests. Finally, I suggest that TAs first internalize these dual purposes of silence to make sense of their teaching labor and later carry it with them as they go from trainee to professional academic.