It’s all about balance: Graduate Teaching Assistant reflections on finding balance between teaching, learning, and research.

Expected to demonstrate merit in teaching, research, or in many cases both, academics are under increasing pressure to meet institutional expectations of excellence, requiring an ability to balance the myriad of ever-growing responsibilities placed upon them. This excellence, no longer only expected of seasoned academics, has resulted in increased pressures for those at all levels of academia. Positioned in university departments across the UK, Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) are experiencing first-hand the complexities of this balancing act, in some cases stretched further due to their student positions. As a GTA there is an expectation that alongside PhD studies students will perform a range of teaching and assessment-based duties across undergraduate programmes. In theory the responsibilities of a GTA should be both limited and manageable, without compromising their ability to focus on their own studies; however, the reality of the role is often misaligned with the projected ideal. For many GTAs the experience of teaching, including the related responsibilities, results in significant time pressures, where time allocation trade-offs between PhD study and the tasks associated with their teaching roles become commonplace. Using reflections of former and current GTAs at a UK business school, this paper seeks to explore the realities of balancing teaching, learning and research; critically assessing the concept of balance using the contrasting perspectives of Inter-Role Conflict Theory (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985) and Interrole Facilitation (Frone, 2003) to provide insights into how these sometimes conflicting responsibilities are shaping our future academics.