Where’s Cathy? Joyful reflections on tricky times

I felt a bit bad when I read Pigeon’s post apologising for a short absence from blogging for Very Serious Reasons! (Happy to note that he seems to have survived the avian vet’s ministrations, though.) Although I’ve been editing the blog here and there with guest posts, I’ve had a much longer period of absence without explanation. This is despite the fact that I’ve got a long and growing list of things I want to write about, including replies to other people’s ALPS blogs that are buzzing round in my head. I will get to this, though possibly in the autumn, as rumour has it that people won’t be reading blogs about active learning in the summer. (Tell me in the comments if this isn’t true!) But today I can at least give you a bit of an update about what I’ve been up to and a few links to teaching-related things that might be of interest.

I’ll get my excuses in first, though. I’m sure everyone can relate to this: it is a truth universally acknowledged that if you write a blogpost about happiness, your life will immediately unravel in every direction at once. I’m not especially superstitious, but even I had the thought on hitting publish that I was probably jinxing something rare and precious. I won’t bore you with the details because not only is this not that sort of blog (though feel free to buy me a pint if you want the full lowdown, with perhaps some small omissions to protect the guilty), but also it would be quicker to tell you what HASN’T gone wrong in the last 18 months and counting. And I don’t want the ALPS blog jinx to hit those things too.

Well. Look. It’s not a competition, but if it were, I definitely couldn’t compete with Pigeon. As I reflected in that original blogpost, my life is blessed with a central kernel of good luck, the technical term for which is – I guess – privilege. Still, some days it has felt like one of those weird dreams where you’re falling and every time you grab onto something that looks solid to save yourself…. that falls away too….

So, in the scramble to survive, I’ve neglected my blogging duties, is what I’m really saying to you. Though I don’t really resile from that original blog on teaching the practices of self-cultivation. I’m glad I learned them at some point in my life because they’ve got me through a tricky time. And so has teaching. The original post was inspired by students wanting to interview me to figure out the secret of my happiness. I don’t think the students who saw me on the last day of term before the Christmas break of 2024, scrambling to finish up the teaching and hold emergency student feedback hours to make up for lost days – exhausted, frayed, pretty miserable, pretty angry – would have had that thought, but they still cheered me up and calmed me down in equal measure and so did their incredible work when they handed it in after the break.

In my writing and teaching this last year, I’ve still been thinking about the politics of the emotions in education, the sector, our work – and about happiness and increasingly the distinction between happiness and joy. Sara Ahmed famously criticises the way the ‘promise of happiness’ holds us in its thrall by directing us towards certain life choices and away from others. In comparison, she is a fan of ‘joy’ – the delight that is fleeting and comes unbidden, that we cannot command in ourselves or others. If the pursuit of happiness is quietist and promotes conformity to lives of quiet desperation, joy gives us the energy we might need to say, ‘no, I won’t be happy, because this isn’t fair and I don’t want a world like this.’ As Nick Montgomery and carla bergson (2017: 29) argue:

‘A joyful process of transformation might involve happiness, but it tends to entail a whole range of feelings at once: it might feel overwhelming, painful, dramatic, and world-shaking. Joy rarely feels comfortable or easy because it transforms and reorients people and their relationships’

That kind of summarises the last couple of years or so for me in a few ways, including what I’ve been doing at work and in education. And all the literature on joy also suggests that we start from what’s working and improvise and experiment from there to thrive and grow.

I started thinking about joy, and also about starting from where we are and noticing what’s working, in my work on education-focused careers in the discipline. I’ve been on the ‘teaching track’ at UCL since before it really existed and I’ve been advocating for the creation of and institutional support for careers focused on education and educational leadership for just as long. I was really hoping for a bit of controversy when me and various colleagues published our article ‘The Joy of the Teaching Track‘ this year. The broad argument we make in that article is that we would like permission to enjoy our jobs without embarrassment, shame, anxiety or envy and that getting that permission is just as much political work as the work to improve our material conditions has been. This used to be really controversial – precisely because of the way the institutionalisation of education-focused careers changes the nature of relationships in the sector – and I had endless arguments about it on Twitter back when Twitter was fun. But perhaps we’ve won the argument already because no-one seems to want to fight me about it any more. Certainly the launch of the inspirational Aspire network run by our very own Jeremy and a big gang of impressive people is a sign that it’s not just me – a lot of people think these jobs are cool and joyful and want to make a career out of education in the sector and support each other to do so. If you want to know more about Aspire and their joyful work, some of the founders appeared on an episode of the Politics and Pedagogy podcast talking about it earlier in the year. I was also privileged to talk at their launch event about the joy of education-focused careers in June.

Meanwhile, not only in the ‘things that have gone right’ column, but also as more evidence that education-focused careers can not only be secure and enriching but also offer the traditional rewards of promotion and recognition…. I got to give an inaugural lecture as a newly minted Professor this year! The title was ‘rewilding the university’ but before you get excited to tune into an account of wolves and beavers being released into the UCL quad (and apparently at least one person turned up genuinely hoping for this….), I need to warn you that I was using the idea of ‘rewilding’ as an extended metaphor to try to think through what a really wild, joyful and beautiful university might look like. If you’re still interested in watching it, it’s here:

The tradition of giving an inaugural lecture is such a lovely one. I have been joking ever since that it’s like being at your own funeral, with everyone saying nice things about you, only you get to be there! Truly the highlight of my year! I’m very glad that UCL is continuing with this practice and it’s also lovely that my department chooses to celebrate the event with a podcast conversation covering some similar themes too:

(By the way, if you’re intrigued by the role-playing exercise I describe in that conversation, an early version of it was the topic of my very first ever ALPS post and includes some detailed instructions if you want to know more or try it out yourself.)

My lovely friends – Martin Compton, a colleague at King’s College London, and Connie Gillies, a former student – also wrote a beautiful blog to capture their response to my inaugural. I get a bit of dust in my eyes when I even think about it.

As they say in the blog, I also worked with Martin and others this year to bring out a special issue of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education on Liberating Learning. I was part of the KCL/UCL editorial collective that worked together to create the edition (under the expert and patient guidance of Martin and Becky Lindner, also of KCL), and I’m excited to say that we won an ALDHE award for the mentoring approach that we took towards supporting authors, including students and early career researchers, to get their work through peer review and published.

I also had an article in that special edition on why I think anonymous marking is a terrible idea and what we should do instead. My answer is ‘relational marking’ which is a version of ungrading that involves heavily deprioritisting numerical marks in favour of deep, supportive conversations about the process of producing academic work and what ‘good work’ looks like. I’ve been meaning to write more about my ungrading practice here – there’s so much to say about it and all of it joyful…. apart from a run-in for the first time this year with the external examiner, which was yet another thing to go wrong, but led to lots of hilarity among my colleagues. Apparently, our Director of Education was heard saying to our Head of Department: ‘How awkward would it be if the external refused to sign the Vice Dean Education’s marks off?’ (Don’t worry – through a combination of charm and imperiousness, and with the support for our Exam Board Chair perhaps slightly against his better instincts, I think I got away with it… this time.)

Finally, the picture above of us talking about the special edition was at the Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics’ annual workshop, this year organised with the Centre for Teaching Political Theory Network at the University of York. Thanks to all of you who came along. It was our biggest event yet, the first time we’ve had parallel sessions. We heard from loads of amazing people at all career stages doing inspiring work in their teaching and educational leadership practice. And in one more piece of evidence that our work in making the ‘teaching track’ a desirable career might be bearing real fruit…. we even had unavoidable ‘manels’. Context is everything and I was therefore very pleased indeed about this. As I joked on the day, these jobs are now so good, even men want them!

So, that was a whistlestop tour of a few highlights of the year. Do let me know if there’s anything you’d like to read more about, once I get back into the blogging groove. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to getting back to teaching my class on the Politics of Nature in the autumn term, editing various teaching-related things that I will report back on in due course, working on a piece on the affective and emotional labour of ungrading in a graded world with Chris Holmes from KCL which will be getting its first outing at the Political Studies Association Teaching and Learning Network conference at Royal Holloway in September, continuing in my Vice Dean Education role which is always busy and never what you expect but will include a big curriculum review this year and…. moving house MORE THAN ONCE poor me. I also had a conversation in passing with a colleague about whether we should co-author a thing on ‘the pedagogy of anger’ (tell me your readings on this please!), which has now turned into a coffee meeting, so that could be a fun detour from joy, compassion and care – but of course will be absolutely linked to them. We only get cross about things that matter and there’s plenty to be cross about at the moment.

So. Lots to celebrate, feel joyful about and look forward to, even in tricky times. Meanwhile, I’m having a few moments of recovery from it all in Scotland, where there are dolphins.