Comfort in Higher Education



I often find myself thinking and turning around ideas of comfort.  This morning on Twitter I found a RT that forced me to rethink my original direction for this post: 


The nuggets of this post started with the uncertainty that seems to be very rampant in higher ed at the moment. The term precariat is a wonderfully evocative word that really does serve almost as onomatopoeia for the situation we see in our post-secondary institutions today.  You can almost see the sessional faculty hanging on to the cliff as the word is passed around social media.

In Toronto members of the two major universities are on strike. At the University of Toronto it is the graduate teaching assistants. At York University it is the teaching assistants and sessional (adjunct) faculty. All of a sudden everyone is talking about the issues that they should have been talking about for months and years. All of a sudden the public has an opinion about what is going on in post-secondary education and this is an opportunity for accurate information to be disseminated.  Sessional and graduate workers are not the “elite” here and yes there is definitely a privilege and power dynamic innate in the ability to even attend graduate school but these workers are not the elbow patch, tweed blazer Paper Chase stereotype (though I do love a tweed blazer). They are highly trained hard working individuals who are at the frontlines of education today (to borrow a not completely inappropriate and sad war analogy) and more often than not their compensation is actually below the poverty line and does not reflect inflation. I know, I was/am/ am in a constant state of becoming one. That’s the uncertainty of the work we do, every term is different, and every term has its own challenges. 

I did not pursue my graduate education because I wanted to be a millionaire or even a thousandaire. I had a career in a completely different field and did a 180 because I have a genuine passion for teaching and pedagogy. Being in an educational space, interacting with learners, interacting with ideas, is exciting; it makes me want to get up in the morning. But you know what else makes me want to get up in the morning- knowing that I have money to pay my rent or buy groceries. I am not asking for lobster, I am just asking for more than Kraft Diner and ramen noodles. I am not asking for a condominium downtown, I am okay with a modest one bedroom apartment. I am not materialistic; you can ask any person who knows me. But regardless of your personal aesthetics or ethics what everyone needs in some way is comfort. 

For those who are following I just described the bottom two of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs- physiological needs and safety needs. Being in the precariat often means the bottom two of the hierarchy of needs is not being met. THE BOTTOM TWO. 

Moving on in this train of thought is how even outside the precariat paradigm higher education is often surrounded or informed by spaces of uncertainty.  The common uncertainty exemplar is that sense of anxiety about a final exam, going in that space not knowing what will be asked of you and if you will have the foundation of learning to navigate through that space. Now testing is a whole other blog post but I mention it here to bring up how things like testing creates uncertainty, creates anxiety. But now back to the fortune above- I want to investigate how (can) comfort zones can be expanded through discomfort in higher education? 

I don’t have the answers, I am not sure any one person has the answers but I know many things for absolutely sure: I have a doctorate, I have over 10 years post-secondary teaching experience, I have glowing teaching evaluations both from my students and from peers who have observed my teaching practices, I am well versed in curriculum review and instructional design principles (including UDL and accessibility requirements), I have a body of research that includes publications and international conferences, I am active in my department and hold numerous service positions, and I am underemployed- and I am not alone. 

We are educated, experienced, and underemployed.

So I ask you is this where the comfort is to be found? In the fact that we are not alone?

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