Academic FOMO: Or What Happened When Ann Didn’t Go to the Conference

This Sunday I didn’t take the time to write a blog because I felt I needed a bit of distance from the writing. I was deep in thought and feeling a bit of academic FOMO. I was supposed to attend NAVSA last weekend and I didn’t because of a series of things I would rather not get into. I had co-organized a lovely panel on Ruskin, which went on without me and the tweets from the conference made me really feel like I was missing out on the discussion and the camaraderie.  I was grateful for Twitter however because it allowed me to explore the discussions in Columbus and bookmark concepts to think about. So the FOMO was strong and real this weekend.

It is also sort of halfway through the term so I used the lovely Sunday to reread some bell hooks and think about pedagogy, access, and inclusion (my three favourite concepts along with Bergsonian durée and Ruskinian tactility). I delved deeper into thoughts on the pedagogical mitsein, the emotional and physical being there that is connected to teaching and learning. That of course got me thinking about the phenomenology of pedagogy as well.  What do all the senses do when we think of teaching, when we are in a pedagogical space, when we interact with learners online? And connected to this is what happens when those senses become overloaded? (which is what happens to both learners and educators this time of year).

The agendas are full for everyone and we speak about the importance of making time for ourselves and embedding mindfulness in what we do. I know for myself I actively think about my shoulders and where they are resting to make sure they are down and not around my ears. My shoulders become one way that I engage with my surroundings and judge how I am feeling. I am sure we all have different tricks that we have for ourselves so we can keep track of just where we are. Education requires a large amount of mitsein, how in a real constructivist educational framework one's own positionality and social location interacts with others, our words and our beings informing the learning environment. hooks speaks a lot about how embodiment is often lost in pedagogy so it is nice to see how we can make sure it has a necessary place in how we think about learning because as much as we would like to think it we are not simply brains on sticks, it is the body that carries the mind and without that envelope none of our great concepts would pour out of our fingers onto the screen.

So what happened when Ann didn’t go to the conference is actually a whole lot of thinking. It’s a very tangled type of thinking right now to be sure, but I will be definitely pulling on those phenomenology, mitsein, and durée strings over the next months.