That which becomes familiar becomes comfortable.
Scotland was the longest trip I have taken on my own in twenty years…the kind of trip long enough for day-to-day mundanity to emerge, long enough that even the Scottish brogue lost a little of its shine and began to sound everyday. In the best way 😉
In the days after I made it home, my family members trickled homeward, too – elder child from college for the first time, partner from a work trip to Australia. The family unit, briefly reunited. Long enough for us to curl up in our well-worn grooves and familiarities, pushing all the old buttons. In the best way.
***
But that was a blink. Another work trip for Dave. Back to college for the elder kid.
And me, bumbling blithely through my days, like Olaf the snowman trying to do whatever it is professors do on sabbatical. Is it coding? I hope it’s coding.
I stick my fingers in my ears and try to ignore the strike mandate looming over the Ontario college system, the hiring freeze at our university. Stiff upper lip; queer shoulder to the wheel.
And then I sit back from the data and laugh, because what I’m coding right now, across hundreds of pages of transcripts from my Scotland interviews, is uncertainty.
This belonging project was always meant to have a mental health facet: to interrogate the protections a sense of belonging can – optimally – create amidst the transitions and becoming of education. The theoretical underpinnings of this work frame belonging as “situated, relational, and processual,” a sociomaterial practice. (Annotated bibliography for the project coming soon, by the way. Bear with me)
So I was ready to code for relational practice and cultural practice and digital practice, all intersecting and situated.
But nested in my transcripts, as in Every Other Layer of the personal and political Matryoshka doll that is the world as I can bring it into focus right now, is uncertainty, everywhere. Uncertainty of belonging, uncertainty of definition and category, uncertainty of futures. Uncertainty that any of us as educators can carry all that is being laid on us right now.
Not in the best way, FWIW. This is not the kind of familiar I think we want to grow comfortable in.
There’s a post-lockdown shock that seems visible in this data. Many interviewees noted changes in student needs and behaviour and engagement, yes, after the emergency online pivot – a disassociation and distancing from conventional expectations, in a sense, with both the challenges and the potential for widening participation that are implied in that. But there’s something more that I’m coding and I’m trying to make sense of it.
We live in so many layers at once. Relentless change. Our sector in austerity. The US election looming and climate change breathing down our necks and billionaires continuing to behave as if the only futures that matter are their own and those of their bottom lines. The horrors of Gaza. Other rippling horrors I do not even know to name, and escalating geopolitical instability making it likely more horrors will emerge.
What does it mean to live and teach and learn amidst collapsing systems? What happens when you have to confront collapse?
There’s a distinction in the way interviewees talk about the pre- and post-lockdown systems they work/ed in, inhabit, aim to be citizens and educators in. The one-two punch of ‘the unprecedented’ followed by the abandonment of a multitude of pretences traces a tree ring in the conversation, a mark of environment on individual…but over and over until it is clearly not an individual mark. I wish I’d asked more questions about this, while I was in Scotland. At the same time, I doubt this is unique to Scotland.
I wonder if most of us who grew up otherwise sheltered by accident of birth from the direct impacts of war, genocide, blatant and visible corruption and unfettered capital have a similar tree ring in our psyches, marking the last five years or so? What does this do to belonging, even in the midst of privilege?
***
I remember the shock of standing in front of my evening class – our final class of the year – on Thursday, March 12, 2020. The Ontario government had announced at 4pm that schools would be closed for at least two weeks following the impending March Break. I’d spent an hour on the phone frantically scrambling to figure out whether my March Break trip to NYC was refundable (spoiler: mostly. Small mercies). My students, pre-service educators set to go out on practicum immediately following March Break, had questions I had no clue how to answer. I could barely fathom telling my kids they were going to be off school for three weeks. Unprecedented.
I could not actually have imagined a world in which they’d be off until September…and then only back sporadically for the year following. I could not at all imagine that most of the first year B.Ed students in front of me would graduate fourteen months later having barely set foot in a face-to-face classroom again. Unprecedented.
Nor could I have imagined that nearly two full years later we’d stagger out of lockdown into million dollar blockades at the international border bridge in our city. The bridge was a kilometre from my younger kid’s school, that year. The protesters, ostensibly mad about the lockdown that was now ending as well as about the vaccine mandates that were a condition of its end, were armed with signs that read “keep kids in school.” Their blockade meant my kid missed additional days of school due to the security risk their illegal protest created. Unprecedented. Also – at least for me – unfathomable.
There is a great deal I have not yet fathomed about my own experience of the lockdown window. In the years since it ended, I know my own institution has put significant effort into a comprehensive mental health plan…but I stopped clicking the wellness-branded mental health-related links back during the lockdown.
They do not help me feel belonging. They do not help me confront what it means to live and work in the shadow of system collapse. They do not help me process my own tree rings, or the recognition that I do not want this current version of the familiar to become comfortable.
***
There are so many other threads to this line of coding…stratification, histories, musings on how GenAI hype is being deployed to distract us from our tree rings and posit a future unreliant on collective human cooperation because…well…the recent past and current state of the world. I’ll wander my way through these ideas eventually, along with the annotated bibliography.
But for the moment…I’m curious whether the idea of a collective post-lockdown mark on us resonates, beyond the boundaries of my data. What are your post-lockdown tree rings? And what sits with you now, becoming familiar but still uncomfortable?
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