Of Comfort and Discomfort

Happy 2024, folks! Another year and another semester is upon us and so is another round of my biweekly blog posts. I am not the type of person who does resolutions, instead I pick a word and that word becomes the focus of my year. This year it was a real toss up between what word I would pick, but I selected the word comfort. The other word that it could have been was trust, but I decided that it was a lot more difficult to focus on trust more holistically in my life at the moment for various reasons than it is to focus on comfort this year. 

So of course being the person I am I always look up the words I use to explore the etymology and origin. The etymology of comfort is from the Old French about consoling or soothing, but also from the Latin for strengthening. Comfort is also one of those words that functions as both noun and verb and I think that is important in the context of HigherEd because there is a lot of disconnect in the discourse between the state of comfort and the action of comfort. 

I am going to expand on three aspects where comfort can be brought in and supported in the spaces you are in. This is of course not a comprehensive list and I am going to try to delve into the nuances that a word like comfort brings, but I am very much looking forward to what sparks for you, if anything, and other areas to explore. 

Comfort and Embodiment: Bringing Your Whole Self to HigherEd

My main motivation for this word is that having moved to a new house this year I have attained a level of residential comfort that I have honestly never had in my life previous. Like the single most source of comfort for me right now is my home, and that is such a strange feeling, and I will expand on how that fits to classroom spaces in the next section. 

I actively struggle with how that comfort feels in relation to having privilege to have a home, when so many folk are unhoused right now, and housing and food scarcity is real for so many, including students and staff in post-secondary spaces. Thinking through this is important as it emphasizes that one brings one's whole self to spaces, and if someone is experiencing housing precarity that will not stop when they get to the doors of the college or university. 

There are also spaces where for others, other things bring them real comfort, maybe their family or their friends, or the particular community they feel a part of (shout out to disability Twitter who was amazing over holiday break in calling out ableist garbage). So comfort can come from many spaces, and sometimes those just appear and sometimes those are planned (like spending alone time when you have done too much peopling). So I feel step one to this is reflecting on what individually brings you comfort (even in the smallest ways) and what comfort gaps you have and maybe who could support in addressing those gaps. 

Comfort in the Classroom: Belonging Discourse

This brings me to point two which is comfort in the spaces that those who read this blog on a regular basis find themselves in, the classroom. This can be a physical on campus classroom space or a virtual classroom space, synchronously or asynchronously. A lot of the discourse around comfort overlaps with this new found discourse of belonging that we have seen increase over the last academic year. The problem with belonging, is that the discourse assumes that there is one thing that belonging is or manifests itself as for every student. It is kind of the continuation of that "for all" narrative that is sadly brought to UDL spaces like UDL will fix everything instantaneously. A recent study by Ajjawi, Gravett, and O'Shea has demonstrated that there are many different kinds of feeling of belonging. The same goes for comfort; there is not one way to guarantee that every learner will feel comfortable. However, there are some contextual pedagogical practices that could help with that sense of needs around comfort. Here are a few:

1. Consistency in providing information, when that information is given (weekly announcements) and where that information is placed in your learning management system
2. Options in ways to contact the teaching team in ways that could feel the most comfortable to them. So for example, email, virtual office hours, community student hours for the class.
3. Real reflection on the group work aspects of the course and how they align to course learning outcomes and if there are UDL principles that could be built in for more choice. This could make the assessment or activity more meaningful, comfortable, and authentic to the learners' lived experience

Comfort in Academe: EDI Initiatives and Not Being Ready for Discomfort

Finally, and this is the part that will get to the second aspect of blog title, comfort is often a lie, and something that a lot of initiatives around equity and inclusion are looking for or talk about (see the discourse of belonging in the previous section) is around being "comfortable with discomfort," but are not ready at all for what happens when that discomfort appears. One only has to take a look at what is happening at Harvard and the way that when someone brings discomfort and awareness of inequity, the next step is to remove the discomfort instead of working to see why that discomfort is there in the first place.

Part of the reason that I picked the word comfort, as I noted, was because I achieved an area of comfort in my housing that I had not had previously and I am working through that, but also because I am working on deeply being okay with the fact that my presence often brings a big amount of discomfort because I remind folk of accessibility gaps on a regular basis and it is discomfort that folk don't know what to do with. Often when I bring something up that needs changing or needs to be addressed, the reaction is either one of silence, defensiveness, or just simply ignoring what was even said, instead of say having a conversation about what should be put in place to support that gap or why that gap is happening in the first place (is it a systemic issue, a policy issue, a people issue). 

I know there are plenty folk who read this blog, who are like me, the embodiment of the Sara Ahmed quotation "when you expose a problem, you pose a problem."  There is of course some level of privilege to that too. Some folk have the privilege of being able to expose those equity and inclusion problems and still be in the space long enough to expose them. For others as soon as the equity problem is exposed they are no longer welcome in that space. I mean that is why HigherEd job postings often have the word "collegiality" in the posting, they are not looking for disruption, they are looking for status quo.  As one of my former students says in texts to me all the time "equity they said!"

For some, years of doing that and being known as "the problem" means they stop saying the things that need saying because they are tired of fighting to fit in a place that was not made for them or change a space to be more inclusive of folk with similar lived experiences. Sometimes life forces you to stop being "that person" because you need to pay the rent, take care of your children and family. 

I was re-reading a card that a former colleague gave me last year (which I often do because it is a great card) and one line struck me about being "the person who says the things" and how that is pretty much how I am defined by so many folk who know me. I am the person who says the things about lack of accessibility, who reminds folk how there is zero mention of queer folk or disabled folk or queer disabled folk in a report. I say the things about equity and inclusion that people do not want to hear or acknowledge because I am the person who brings discomfort in that acknowledgement. And so I guess I want to end this long post with a shout out to the people who know they are the people who bring discomfort to HigherEd when they remind others of inequities and exclusion. May 2024 be the year where we are okay with being comfortable with the discomfort we bring, and the year that those who are faced with that discomfort choose to make change instead of pink slips.