Megan Boler: A Pedagogy of Discomfort
Megan Boler is a professor of Theory and Policy Studies at the University of Tornoto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. She has published in the areas of new media and democracy, feminist emotion studies, and critical pedagogy. She is author of the now classic Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (1998) in which she observes in detail the ways sexism, racism, Enlightenment thought, and schooling in the U.S. control emotion to maintain various forms of injustice.
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"My minimal hope is that students examine their values, and analyze how they came to hold those values." |
This book also reclaims emotion from the 'private,' feminine sphere, exploring the ways emotion can be a liberating form of knowing. All of the scholars discussed at length on this website are in one way or another indebted to Boler's Feeling Power. Her study was one of the earliest to deeply account for emotion's gendered history and unspoken presence in the college composition classroom.
Emotional Inquiry & Action
Boler defines her pedagogy of discomfort in two-parts. It is both "an invitation to inquiry" and "a call to action" (176). Critical inquiry is part of any college writing classroom, but for Boler, inquiry should primarily help students better understand the ways "emotions define how and what one chooses to see, and conversely, not to see” (177). Boler, like Lynn Worsham and all of the scholars on this website, is interested in the ways emotions generate social and cultural attachments within individuals. Therefore, she insists that inquiry should always be understood "in relation to others, and in relation to personal and cultural histories and material conditions” (178). Inquiry into one’s values, identity positions, and beliefs cannot occur successfully without acknowledging the presence of other people as well as larger social and ideological systems.
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"The first sign of a successful pedagogy of discomfort is, quite simply, the ability to recognize what it is that one doesn't want to know, and how one has developed emotional investments to protect oneself from this knowing." |
Ideally, Boler’s pedagogy of discomfort would expose students to what she calls “inscribed habits of (in)attention,” or the willingness to dwell in beliefs inherited non-critically (180). The point is not to change students’ values necessarily (Boler is very clear about this). Rather, she hopes to challenge students to self-interrogate and dwell in moral differences in an informed manner. This kind of exploration into emotional attachments creates opportunity for students to see their own personal experience, values, and ways of seeing as they are shaped by larger social, cultural, and political orders.
Dwelling in the Discomfort
In most humanities courses, students are challenged to subject their own self-image, beliefs, and values to investigation. This self-reflection lends itself to emotional resistance in the form of "defensive anger," "fear of change," and "fears of losing our personal and cultural identities" (Boler 176). As Stenberg and Winans both observe, emotion has the potential to derail critical inquiry when not treated correctly, particularly in courses that focus on racism, sexism, and other forms of inequality.
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"What do we--educators and students--stand to gain by engaging in the discomforting process of questioning cherished beliefs and assumptions?" |
Instead of ignoring or quelling these emotioned responses/meanings in the classroom, Boler argues that teachers should encourage their students to explore what insights are to be had in the space between their emotions and their beliefs. Hence her phrase, a pedagogy of discomfort. Boler argues that dwelling in this discomfort creates a space for students to become ambiguous selves--to distance their identities from their moral investments enough to enable productive, fair, inquiry into their values and beliefs without slipping into defensive anger, blame, or guilt. Although "living with ambiguity is discomforting," it is necessary for people to become aware how they see the world and also to change it (196).