The Pedagogical Danger of Familiarity

Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about the dangers that come from the familial in our educational spaces. This plays itself out in different ways so I will try to elaborate on what I mean, but I want to emphasize the familial in a couple of ways. The first is what happens when everyone knows everyone else (often too well) in smaller higher education institutions. The second is what happens when one becomes too comfortable with one's pedagogical content or pedagogical choices in educational spaces. And the third is something that I have spoken about before which is what you should be thinking when there is an emphasis on "we are family" spoken by administrators in educational spaces.

The first danger of the familiarity happens often in smaller institutions or in smaller cities where everyone seems to have been working there for 20 years and everyone knows everyone else. On the surface people will frame this as a win. They will say that they are a tight community or frame it as a more personalized educational experience for learners. And in some ways that could happen, but in many ways what happens instead is nothing; stagnation, and lack of change and awareness of new ideas, methodologies, theories. Places like this become representative of "how we have always done it" and it becomes much more difficult to enact change in spaces like that than in bigger spaces. Sadly this means that pedagogically anything that has to do with innovation, inclusion, diversity, or foundational equity becomes a struggle, or more of a struggle than in other places. 

This can also happen across institutions, but within particular disciplines where there are very few degrees of separation between folk who have been in graduate student and advisor relationships. This is where signature pedagogies become slower to change and advance even if the literature or research or surveys demonstrate the need for a different approach.

The second danger of familiarity is connected to this which is what happens when you have taught the same thing for many years in the same way. There is absolutely a need for some sort of comfort in our pedagogical spaces so that we can foster the excitement for our subject matter area and pedagogical strategies. However, when one becomes too comfortable, or expects things to be done always in a certain way, we exclude learners and different ideas from our spaces. On one level Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework to help support the danger of familiarity, allowing learning to still meet objectives and outcomes in different ways. However even in UDL there is still a tendency (coming very much from the United States, but then creeping into so many other spaces because of the self-claimed "edustars" who take up all the air in the room with their self-promotions) that UDL needs to be done in one particular way and it is often a way that is very K-12 that does not work well in higher education contexts.

Connected to this second danger of familiarity and pedagogy is the sort of holy grail given to traditional publishing methods as opposed to the grey literature, like blogs and podcasts. It would take a lot of eduspace change to get folk to actually realize that all that is fit to publish in traditional spaces like journals is highly exclusionary of the voices that one needs to hear from, disabled learners and researchers, Indigenous learners and researchers, Queer learners and researchers. Being comfortable in eduspace often means being comfortable and unquestioning of these traditional models of publishing and pedagogy just because that is always how it has been (see point one).

Finally, the third danger of familiarity comes from the we are family narrative. This often happens again in smaller educational institutions, but you will also see it within academic associations, or disciplinary working groups. The danger with this we are family narrative, is exactly the same danger as I note above around publishing. What family are you hoping to create? Because chances are it is a white, heteronormative, abled bodymind family and this is reinforced time and again. It is the kind of stuff that gets subsumed in "collegial" as a word in job postings by HR. It is shown in spaces where "we are family" is noted and then someone mentions something queer-theory related and the response is "does that align to our values?" It is seen in spaces where "we are family, always reach out" is mentioned, but when you have a hard question or an issue no one wants to touch the emails go unanswered. For folk who have more connection to their chosen family than their biological family, "we are family" as a statement is incredibly activating, and reinforces a kind of space that they were actively excluded from because of their positionality.

I think of these things about family and familiarity and the familial, because there are also spaces where being too familiar is looked down on, places where administrative hierarchies are important and will also weaponize equity terminologies against folk in equity-deserving groups. In places where cliques are such a thing (everything you learned in middle and high school is all you need to know for college and university trust me) the idea of the familiar and the familial is heavy. You only need to look at the etymology of family [opens in new tab] to see what I mean. Our individualized lived experience and positionality is so important, and in places where folk know each other too much or for a long time, and have done things in a certain way for so long, those individuals who don't quite fit into whatever conceptualization of family is being created and reinforced feel it every day. They feel it in conversations they have no way of being part of, they feel it in activities that simply do not resonate with their lived experience. 

So I will end this post with two connected question for those who have made it this far: how familiar/familial does your education space feel? How familiar/familial do you think it feels to someone new/ who was hired to do work with a specific equity framing? I think you probably already know the answer to these questions, but they are important to ask nonetheless.