16 Don’t Forget to Breathe: Advice for Coping with Graduate Teaching Anxiety

The first time entering a classroom as the instructor of record can be frighteningly dysphoric. Anxiety is defined by the American Psychological Association (2019) as “persistent, excessive worries that don’t go away even in the absence of a stressor.” Between precarious employment, demanding coursework, and figuring out this whole research thing, graduate students have plenty to stress about. Anxiety and stress can manifest with similar symptoms (e.g., increased heart rate, sweating, insomnia, extreme fear, etc.)—the difference is in the temporality of the stress experience (APA, 2019). Even today, a decade after I started teaching undergraduates, I still get butterflies in my stomach, a sweaty brow, and clammy hands in those awkward moments before a class session starts.

In this chapter, I synthesize research on graduate student anxiety and teaching anxiety to articulate the unique communication apprehension phenomenon of graduate teaching anxiety. Given that graduate students are about six times more likely to experience anxiety and depression than the general population (Evans, Bira, Gastelum, Weiss, & Vanderford, 2018), being a graduate student is an endemically stressful vocation. Compounding this problem is that “many graduate students are required to teach as part of their assistantship, forcing them to balance roles they may or may not even want” (Musgrove, 2020, p. 56). However, teaching is a core part of graduate education in many disciplines for good reason. Not only are graduate students more effective than full time faculty at convincing undergraduate students to major in a discipline, but graduate students who teach frequently are also more likely than their teaching-averse peers to graduate and find gainful employment (Bettinger, Long & Taylor, 2016). In other words, it behooves both departments and graduate students to find strategies for helping new teachers cope with anxiety.

To be clear, nothing written here is meant to let institutions off the hook by suggesting only individuals ought to be responsible for their own mental health. The rhetoric of well-being in academic institutions too often conceals the psychologically distressing demands of academia (Hurd & Singh, 2020). Institutions can and should design better processes for ameliorating the systemic stresses of graduate education (Bekkouche, Schmid, & Carliner, 2021) rather than laying that responsibility on their overburdened graduate workforce. An estimated 50% of all doctoral students in the United States do not finish their degree programs (Patterson, 2016), suggesting a widespread structural problem with graduate education that will require the sustained resource commitments of higher educational institutions to solve. In my experience in and observations of graduate programs, graduate students are often thrown into a classroom with little more preparation than a standardized syllabus and a four-day pedagogy seminar the week before classes start.

Without proper pedagogical training, graduate instructors may enter a classroom with subject knowledge but little to no confidence in their ability to communicate that knowledge to others. This is a problem because, as scholar Selami Aydin (2021) has argued, “teaching anxiety is one of the most considerable concerns in the teaching and learning processes that directly and negatively affect teaching effectiveness” (p. 747). These stakes are magnified by the fact that graduate students make up 28% and 22% of instructional faculty at R1 and R2 universities respectively (American Association of University Professors, 2018), meaning graduate teaching anxiety can significantly impact the quality of undergraduate education at an institution. Universities can and should do better when it comes to graduate student mental health and well-being. However, waiting for institutional change does little to help a panic-stricken graduate student the night before teaching their first class.

While we wait a few millennia longer for evolution to sort out the appropriate stress response mechanisms for lecturing to undergraduates, it is important to be conscious of the human tendency to catastrophize all threats as mortal threats. Obviously, staring down a hippo hoping it doesn’t eat you while you gather enough water to stave off dehydration is not the same as staring down first-year students in your department’s general education service course. However, both phenomena can elicit the same biochemical fight or flight responses that, in the case of the hippo, can keep you alive but, in the case of students, may betray the subject authority graduate students work so hard to achieve.

Over the last decade I have taught 32 sections of public speaking despite never having taken the course in my undergraduate program nor having ever been taught to teach the course in my graduate programs. The first time I taught public speaking was during my master’s program. I taught at a community college down the street from my university. The assistantship I’d been awarded for my master’s program was for coaching debate rather than teaching, so to get the teaching experience I would need on the job market, a mentor counselled me to apply for the adjunct pool at the local community college. Getting the call from the college’s basic course director informing me I had been assigned to teach a section of public speaking was both exciting and terrifying.

I remember thinking they must be desperate to assign a second-year master’s student with no teaching experience. Reflecting on that course now, I realize how awful it must have been for those students who endured my pedagogical growing pains. Every class session must have seemed like a joke as I dutifully, and unironically, exhibited some of the worst characteristics of public speaking behavior including overreliance on poorly designed slide decks, avoiding eye contact with my audience, talking too fast, and digressing into jargonish gibberish every time a student asked me a question. It was bad—I knew it, the students knew it, and as I was not asked to teach another course for that community college, I assume the basic course director eventually figured it out as well.

Although my students that semester may not have learned much from me, I learned two incredibly valuable lessons from my miserable performance teaching them: bad teaching is survivable, and failure is acceptable. Properly framed, failing in the classroom is training for other graduate student endeavors. For example, trying out examples and explanations on undergraduate students can help a graduate student refine answers to questions they receive about their work from peers at conferences or from their committee members at their defenses. Such a statement may seem painfully obvious, but because of our anxiety-ridden, survival-focused, and evolutionarily-outdated human psychology, we must occasionally remind ourselves that death is an exceedingly unlikely outcome of encountering failure as a teacher. We may know that consciously, but research suggests speaking in front of an audience is a more common fear than the fear of dying (Speech Communication Association, 1973; Dwyer & Davidson, 2012), which—I might suggest—makes teaching an act of mortal courage.

I started my doctoral program about seven years after finishing my master’s degree. In that space of time, I taught a lot as an instructor working for a dual-mission university (meaning the institution sustains baccalaureate programs alongside a community college mission). Returning as a doctoral graduate instructor after having taught for so many years as a non-tenure track instructor was humbling. I remember meeting the interim writing program administrator on the first day of pre-semester graduate instructor training and wondering who between us had more teaching experience—an exercise in hubris and ego protection more than utility. It was her first time being responsible for the pedagogical training of graduate instructors in the composition program, but to the extent she felt nervous or anxious about that fact, she rarely showed it while teaching.

However, my graduate student anxiety about my own competence as a writer, teacher, and scholar manifested in a few antagonistic interactions I had with the interim writing program administrator. Upon reflection, I suspect I felt threatened by learning from her how much I didn’t know about teaching, even after having taught undergraduate courses for so long. In a few out-of-class conversations with her near the end of that semester, I came to understand that she likely did feel a good deal of anxiety and students like me didn’t make it any better. That realization arrived too late because I was absorbed in experiencing my own learning anxiety and fear of judgement. In other words, I was more afraid of her than she had any reason to be of me.

Power dynamics make all this understandable. Teachers have more power over students than students have over teachers. The asymmetry is not always apparent to the graduate instructor who plays both the role of teacher and student, nor is it apparent to the students of graduate instructors. For many of our undergraduate students, a full professor and a graduate instructor are both just teachers. Whether or not you feel like an expert in your content area, you may be the only disciplinary expert some undergraduate students will ever encounter. When they think of biology, foreign languages, writing, chemistry, or anthropology, it is your face that may come to represent your discipline in their limited experience. That is a lot of pressure, but it is also a lot of power.

Metaphorically speaking of atmosphere, one evaluation comment that has stuck with me for many years simply read “don’t forget to breathe” as a singular piece of qualitative feedback. The brevity of the comment belied the value of its insight. Likely, the student was referencing the fast pace with which I spoke as I anxiously sped read through text heavy slide decks about ancient rhetoric and public delivery. However, the comment resonated with me at a much deeper level. When I read that comment, I had just quit smoking and had finished up a summer of hiking in the foothills above the university. On the elevated trails, my lungs felt the benefits of my smoking cessation efforts as I inhaled the fresh mountain air above the city, held it in for just a moment, and exhaled it back into the atmosphere. As some feminist researchers have noted, there is a trans-corporeal quality to breathing (Górska, 2016; Neimanis & Walker, 2014). To breathe is to enter an exchange between human and more-than-human bodies. Such exchanges make life possible but also, as the COVID era has painfully taught us, may put life at risk.

What does it mean to not forget to breathe as a graduate instructor coping with teaching anxiety? For me, it means slowing down and remembering that teaching is a social action that makes for a better conversation than it does a diatribe. Atmosphere connects us to one another. In the classroom, we breathe the same air whether we are in a desk or at a teaching station operating the projector. Breath helps circulate molecules through perceptually deceiving spaces of nothingness. Matter is between us, connecting us through the material wanderings of breath passing back and forth in dialectical engagement—surrounding and carrying our words. Breathing deeply is an act of muscular desensitization that relaxes us, preparing our lungs and minds for more efficient operation while teaching and learning.

In sharing my experiences, I’ve articulated three lessons I’ve learned about teaching that have helped me cope with graduate teaching anxiety. First, teaching will not kill you. We are biochemically wired to make a big deal out of nothing. That combination of instinct and physiology was great when we were competing with lions, tigers, and bears for food, but less great when performing at the front of a lecture hall.

Second, students are more afraid of you than you are of them. Don’t let that get to your head, but it should be a relieving insight to know power dynamics being what they are, most students are much more concerned with your impression of them as learners than they are of their impression of you as an inexperienced teacher. Some students will even ignore academic hierarchy altogether in their communications by inappropriately referring to you as a “Dr.” or “Professor”—a telltale indicator of the point I am making, but also a wonderful ego boost if you need one.

Third, don’t forget to breathe. Go slow, take your time to teach at a pace that includes everyone. Use the interconnected nature of breath to your advantage by creating hospitable atmospheres for teaching and learning. Remembering to breathe is as much about being kind to yourself as it is about being kind to your students. Mutual interdependence is demonstrated by the need to breathe and, taken seriously as a pedagogical framing, can help create symbiotic pathways of support between graduate instructors and their students.