Exploring the ‘Invisible’ in GTAs: Reflections on Intuition and Post-Graduate Mentoring

Abstract

Postgraduate researchers who teach (Graduate Teaching Assistants) always navigate their academic spaces among several psychological factors in their routines from both inside and outside. They can often be observed attending to students, advising them on their problems and sometimes even relying on their seniors for various topics. In such situations, practitioner intuition remains a well-known and relied-upon source of GTA's decision-making skills but also an underexplored area of investigation, especially in mentoring and language teaching literature (Ushioda, 2023; Burns & Williams, 2023 & Kumar, 2024). Based on this premise, this reflective paper aims to simplify and understand the GTA's pedagogic intuition towards success and failures in PG thesis writing contexts from peer-mentoring perspectives. The initial sections of the paper, imagining GTA's as mentors and their learners as mentees, establish what GTA intuition can be thought of, how it is related to Vygotsky's ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) and the potential operations based on an intuitive decision-making model.

The latter part of the paper offers detailed practical insights about these theoretical connections through my own workings of intuition while scaffolding the PG mentees to plan, execute and write their theses. Detailed reflections of both the GTA/mentor and the mentees elicited through think-aloud and discursive puzzling measures are reported extensively. Lastly, the paper advocates for more work towards exploring GTA's intuition in mentoring scenarios (and otherwise), getting more awareness from their cognitions and becoming more intuitive practitioners.