What We Come To Accept

I took a few days off from work with the intention of visiting friends that I hadn't seen in a while, but my bodymind had other ideas. So instead I have spent the last three days doing a whole lot of the usual around here, which is thinking too much, and seeing instructor friends and students cross the finish line of the semester with exhaustion, and other common feelings one finds at the end of the academic year.

I have been thinking this week about the kinds of things we come to accept and often come to expect in our academic places and what we can do to disrupt those expectations because to be honest some of them are really not healthy. For example, maybe you work in an older building with very bad temperature control, to the point where the running joke is make sure you have both a fan and a sweater in your office. I mean sure, ha ha, insert Canadian stereotype about being ready for any weather in spring, but also why is it okay that we have to accept working in such conditions? Do we not deserve a temperature that works for folk? Do we not deserve some control over what that temperature is like?

Or the other "joke" which is folk saying they are ready for their end of term illness because that is what happens when all the grading is done. And sure, but also why does that tend to happen? Probably because the expectations are too much and time constraints too tight, and folk tend to over exert themselves (both instructors and students) and then the bodymind has to readjust by crashing to over compensate. And what happens to folk who simply cannot afford to get sick at the end of the semester? Why are we okay with that being the thing we come accept?

We become trained, both as instructors and as students, about what we have to accept in our higher education spaces. And this week we have also seen what happens when folk choose to stop accepting what has been a given and fight back. The systems don't like that; it is not what they have chosen to accept from those who don't make those decisions. We don't spend a lot of time thinking about how necessary it is to disrupt what we have come to accept, and just how much of our eduspaces is about navigating what we have come to accept, instead of together, in thought, re-envisioning the possibilities, the potential of what could be if we worked towards that possibility. What could be if we stopped accepting everything as a given? What could be if we come to accept, that we each, every one of us, brings a spark, brings light, brings warmth, to places the systems want to keep dark and cold and unquestioning? The possibilities are endless.