The Fluidity of Graduate Teaching Assistants: Role-Playing and Experiential Learning in Teaching and Research

Professional identity in academia is negotiated at the intersection of personal agency, institutional structures, and pedagogical practice. Although identity negotiation remains dynamic even for experienced academics, it is particularly complex for Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), who occupy liminal positions as student researchers and seminar tutors. prior research has examined GTA workload and role conflict, but a methodological gap remains in understanding how GTAs develop pedagogical judgment through experiential learning across their multiple roles. This paper explores how GTAs role-play academic identities as instructors, researchers and emerging scholars through role-fluid experiential learnings engaging as part of informal professional apprenticeship. Drawing on reflective autoethnography from three international GTAs with over one year of teaching experience in a UK business school, the study applies the four stages of Kolb’s experiential learning theory to examine how teaching development unfolds as cyclical experience through concrete experience, reflection, abstract conceptualisation, and active experimentation. Our reflections show prior experiences inform constructivist, student-centred pedagogy. Using analytic vignettes, we arrived at three main themes: student engagement, performative flexibility, and cultural adaptation, each demonstrating how experiential learning shapes pedagogical agency. Through this process, early performative teaching evolved into intentional pedagogical design and identity development. The study extends GTA identity scholarship by showing how GTA identity is shaped through fluid, experience‑based learning and informal developmental work, rather than only through formal training, workload, or role‑conflict accounts.