Can HighFlex Pedagogy Exist in a LowFlex Society?

Around this exact time last year I was sitting in my backyard on my eyePad typing out an article about flexibility. More specifically it was a reflection on how much institutions were asking instructors and staff to bend in the face of the pandemic. It was published in January in ESC and you can read it here if you are interested. The piece also acknowledged a breaking point looming even though we had only been in the situation for about four months. Little did I know that almost sixteen months later, I would be still thinking about these situations, still acknowledging that breaking point that has long long past. 

A discussion of flexibility of course requires a discussion of context. Who is being asked to be flexible? What sort of training or resources are made available to the person being asked to be flexible? Is there a sense of community there that can support inclusion, or an awareness of who may be not at the table or lost in systemic pressures and assumptions? What about the pedagogy that informs this flexibility? Is there an explicit and meaningful design to both the curriculum as expressed and the pedagogy as praxis? As you can see there are many questions here that often are not asked or even considered when an ask for flexibility is presented. Context as I have mentioned many times in the past and will probably mention a thousand more times in the future, has been completely forgotten in this pandemic, and this lack of context awareness causes a lot of pain in big and small ways. I offer an example.

I was in a meeting yesterday that made me sad. This is not anything new. I am in lots of meetings that make me sad lately. What made me sad is there was a question that was asked "what are you looking forward to?" a simple enough question really for most people.  It is a question that can easily come from those who at the moment are employed or housed. But it is a question that forgets that both of those privileges can be temporary and it is also a question that assumes a bunch of other privileges like mobility, health, having community, having family. If someone does not have one or many of those privileges the question of what are you looking forward to can often be a resounding "not much."  Especially if you sit and watch everyone get on with their lives. Especially if you sit and see your institution say everyone back in the campus pool without actually supporting employees to make sure they can in fact get into the campus pool (because capitalism means hey if you get sick or die we will just hire someone else; those who don't readily fit in privileged norms are expendable). And I wonder just how many people realize that having something to look forward to is actually a real real privilege and that context is a thing. 

We live in a society where systems and barriers exist to exactly suggest that some folk by the very nature of their positionality will have something to look forward to that is positive. For others (often those with marginalized identities and intersections) the only thing to look forward often is something overwhelming or negative. This is because we live in a society that does not embrace flexibility in any way. Policies are policies. Systems are systems. 

And yet, these same institutions that uphold systems, are asking those who are part of the systems to be flexible, to just accept what is being given and roll with it if you will. In HigherEd this looks like prepare your course in a way that is modality agnostic and can be delivered online, in person, or in a blended format, because you never know. In health care this looks like just take the subpar medical health support and information we are providing you because look just be happy that this is a "free" service you are being given (and "maybe you are asking for too much" direct quotation from my mother when I told her that I have not had a single health care encounter that was positive in my whole life). The bar is presented as very low for so many who can't even conceptualize having a bar at a height they can reach. Maybe you are asking for too much.....shake my head. 

So I sit here and wonder, how can both a highflex pedagogy that takes different modalities, life possibilities, and inclusive situations, exist in such a lowflex world? There seems to be a massive disconnect in terms of what we are expecting of people and what the world actually supports. I don't know what the answer is except to again say, your situation is not everyone else's situation, the student demographic in your course is not everyone else's student demographic. I might just buy a bunch of t-shirts imprinted with the word CONTEXT in bold and just point to it every time someone makes a homogeneous assumption. Some of you may be seeing a real light at the end of the tunnel and if that is you congrats, but just remember for a lot of others, that tunnel is still really really dark.