Think About Whose Comfort Your Classroom Centers

"The word hygge comes from a Danish word meaning "to give courage, comfort, joy". Hygge stems from hyggja which means “to think” in Old Norse."

The last couple of years of the Covid-19 pandemic I've seen a lot of pieces talking about embraxing maximalism and comfort in homes many people were confined to, both a reaction against the minimalism trend and a way of finding in comfort in a personal space when there was none to find in the outside world.

I've been thinking a lot of about what care and comfort looks like in education, how gendered the perception of care is, how there are certain cultural and societal expectations of what care should look like. Yesterday I wore my SmartWool thick socks and was reminded of how much I love soft, comforting things. How they can make the difference between me being able to deal with a day or not. There's a reason why so many of us come home from work and the first thing we do is get into comfortable clothes. 

But what does comfort look like in education? Whose comfort gets centered and privileged by the institution?

Most of the time the system defaults to privileging the comfort of the professor, with topics, policies, conversations. I think too a lot of the problems in education can be traced back to professors and teachers becoming too comfortable with something- their way of teaching, the texts they teach, the work they'll accept, what may start as comfort becomes fossilized, impossible to change based on new information or experience, frozen in time, incapable of doing anything else. This is always at the detriment of our students and communities. 

The majority of people learn the most from what they get wrong, experimenting, exploring. But as research on grades and ungrading has illustrated if the system privileges comfort, what is known, above experimenting and learning, you're going to end up with the exact same results over and over again.

Teachers and professors teach the same texts and lessons and assignments semester after semester, year after year, sometimes decade after decade. This disregards the fact that new information, new scholarship should be reflected in what we teach. It disregards the fact that we have different students, in a different world, every semester. I think for a lot of teachers and professors they continue to do what is comforting because it doesn't challenge anything, it doesn't rock the boat, it doesn't move the goal post or expect anything different. They also do what is comfortable because it centers them, keeps them in control. Telling students that this semester is different from last because of world events opens the door to conversations about WHAT those events are.Telling students that you're changing, altering a text or approach because it's not working shows students teachers and professors are fallible, don't always get it right. Letting go of control in the classroom can be very scary for some people.

I was struck by the end of the definition of "hygge," the history of it, because I like the idea of thinking about what makes us comfortable in the classroom, what makes us uncomfortable, whose comfort we're centering and why. Even having the conversation about comfort is a privilege, assumes that a host of issues and topics are NOT a concern. Only certain teachers or professors get to be comfortable as their default. How different does education look if teachers and professor centered their students' comfort?