Empowering Graduate Teaching Assistants in Chemistry: Collaborative Action Research and GTAs’ Professional Agency

Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) in STEM are typically not encouraged to make contributions to curriculum and pedagogy development, limiting their professional agency as educators beyond the role of content delivery. This study investigates how collaborative action research (CAR) creates conditions in which chemistry GTAs claim and exercise professional agency. Grounded in Eteläpelto and colleagues’ subject-centered sociocultural framework of professional agency, we present a qualitative study of a fifth-year chemistry GTA, Kevin, who engaged in a semester-long CAR process to address challenges in an inorganic chemistry lab. Data from field notes, artifacts, and an exit interview revealed three key manifestations of Kevin’s agency: (1) transitioning from not regarding student feedback as meaningful to systematically integrating student feedback into lab redesign; (2) shifting from focusing on students’ intrinsic motivation as a source of disengagement to addressing curricular barriers; and (3) envisioning broader impacts through scholarly dissemination and iterative CAR cycles. Key enablers of this exercise of professional agency included both the individual factors (e.g., commitment to teaching, work history) and sociocultural conditions (e.g., funding, CAR’s collaborative ethos, exposure to education research, and faculty support). These findings suggest that CAR-inspired, collaborative, reflective, and iterative professional development models can cultivate enabling spaces where GTAs emerge as reflective and innovative educator-scholars.