Feminization, Standardization, and Graduate Students

Something that really struck me in the Bartlett article "Feminization and Composition's Managerial Subject" was the way she talked about the role of the graduate student who teaches composition. It's true that we (and I mean graduate students at TTU, and elsewhere) are expected to perform the tasks for a (not quite) full time instructor with much less pay and more expensive benefits. It is also true that, while I wouldn't say that any professor I have or have had (barring a couple of misfits) has ever made me feel any less than a burgeoning colleague, we do not have the same institutional or societal status as those around us, some of whom are performing similar if not exactly the same tasks. Even as I write this, I see clearer and clearer the connection to feminization. Before starting into this unit of reading, I suppose I've always just assumed that this model was just "the grad school way" and that to question it would be folly. But now I have to ask: isn't there another way? 

Then I look at the kind of top-down structuring of courses described by Bartlett (and lived by me) in which large portions of graduate students teaching composition are using syllabi and texts determined by the powers that be. The instructors of these courses, largely graduate students like ourselves, are supplemented (read: indoctrinated) at various seminars, workshops, group planning sessions, and so on. The burden of which -- and here I mean the burden of time and additional effort required beyond both one's coursework and the actual administrative duties of teaching a course oneself -- is put squarely on the shoulders of the student. And in the case of many programs these are unpaid hours.

I also notice how much of what Bartlett describes as a symptom of feminization, we just two weeks ago called standardization. I guess what I'd like to know is: Is there a more democratic way to standardize our writing courses that involves the direct input of graduate students to create an constantly evolving though cohesive program? Or would it require a systematic shift so great that current university model just can't support it?