African International Teaching Assistants’ Experience of Racial Microaggressions in a Canadian Higher Education Institution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pervasive racial microaggressions (subtle and everyday racist acts) continue to challenge African international teaching assistants (AITAs) who strive to create conducive learning environments for students in a Canadian university. This qualitative study drew from racial microaggression theory and gathered data through semi-structured individual interviews to examine seven former AITAs’ experiences of racism in their teaching assistant (TA) duties. Findings indicated that non-Black students doubted AITAs’ subject-matter expertise, undermined their English communication skills, and often exhibited aggressive behaviours. Suggestions were made for current and future AITAs, course instructors, and universities that hire them to help improve the quality of AITAs’ duties and their students’ learning experiences. As previous studies largely overlook AITAs’ experiences with racial microaggressions, this study makes significant contributions to the literature that, in turn, can inform policy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".