Assigning virtue: Uncovering the personal, bureaucratic, and disciplinary virtues in the writing assignment guidelines used by Graduate Teaching Assistants at East Carolina University

Abstract

Writing assignment guidelines are an important but often overlooked marker of teacherly identity. While they are deployed by individual instructors, they sit at an important juncture of individual, bureaucratic, and disciplinary virtues. Using this virtue ethics lens, I examine writing assignment guidelines produced between 2014 and 2023 by graduate teaching assistants at East Carolina University. I identify a virtue of rhetorical awareness as well as moral habits of conversation, grammar, and process and demonstrates the way GTAs communicate virtues through their major writing assignment guidelines.