(Dis)comfort and Joy

On what it actually feels like to learn something that matters, and what it costs to teach it.

There's a version of transformative pedagogy that makes it sound straightforwardly good. Students flourish, assumptions unravel, something shifts. The language of progressive education is full of this: growth, aliveness, possibility.

What it talks about less is the difficulty. The student who goes quiet. The room that doesn't warm up. The session you leave wondering whether you pushed too hard or not hard enough. The semester where you gave everything and came home empty.

This pillar sits with both sides, because they're not opposites. Discomfort and joy aren't in tension in transformative learning. They're the same territory, approached from different angles. The moments of genuine intellectual aliveness often arrive through difficulty. The willingness to stay in a hard conversation is itself a form of care. And the question of what makes learning come alive is inseparable from the question of what it costs to create the conditions for it.

What we're actually asking when we ask about joy

The Joy Index project started from a deceptively simple question: what makes learning come alive? Not what makes it effective, or measurable, or aligned with outcomes, but what makes students and educators feel something is actually happening, that the work is worth doing.

That question turns out to be harder to answer than it looks, partly because joy in educational contexts is not the same as happiness or ease. It's closer to what Csikszentmihalyi called flow: full absorption in something that matters. Or what hooks described as the excitement of ideas meeting something real in a person's life. It can coexist with struggle. It often requires it.

Mapping Joy: A Cross-Institutional Experiment is the live research strand of this work, tracking what students and educators across institutions identify as moments of genuine aliveness in learning. It's an ongoing project, not a finished argument, which feels right for a question this open.

On discomfort as information

Discomfort in the classroom is usually treated as a problem to manage. A student pushes back, the energy drops, someone crosses their arms, and the instinct is to smooth it over, speed up, move on.

Teaching Otherwise reads discomfort differently. Not as failure, but as signal. When students resist creative methods, or go quiet during a discussion about power and ethics, or retreat behind technical language when something gets personal, something is happening that's worth attending to rather than bypassing.

The question isn't how to eliminate discomfort but what kind of discomfort is generative and what kind is just harm. There's a meaningful difference between the productive friction of an idea that challenges a settled assumption, and the discomfort of feeling unseen or unsafe. One is where learning lives. The other is where it stops.

Room in the Bag of Stars thinks through this via Le Guin's carrier bag theory, what it means to gather fragments and hold contradictions rather than resolving them into neat conclusions. Playing Our Way to Different Futures tracks what happens in the room when students build with their hands rather than argue with their heads, including the resistance that comes first and the something else that arrives after.

The cost of teaching otherwise

There is a version of this conversation that focuses entirely on students, their discomfort, their joy, their transformation. That version is incomplete.

Teaching otherwise within institutions that weren't designed for it is its own kind of labour. The careful session design that doesn't look like work to anyone observing. The energy it takes to hold a difficult room. The decision to stay with a question rather than cover the material. These things are not cost-free, and the people who teach this way are often also the people designing for students while quietly not designing for themselves.

Sustainable Teaching: Why We Design for Students But Not for Ourselves is a direct look at this. Not in the spirit of complaint, but in the spirit of honesty about what it actually takes to sustain a practice that runs against institutional grain.

Small Stands, Big Questions is about the smaller version of the same thing, the daily decision to teach from a value rather than a script, and what that accumulates to over time.

Why this pillar exists

Most pedagogy discourse focuses on students. This pillar also focuses on educators, on what it means to stay present and curious and honest in a role that asks a great deal, inside systems that often ask for compliance instead.

The argument here isn't that teaching should be more comfortable. It's that the feelings in the room, ours and theirs, are data and not disruption. That joy is not a reward for doing the work well but part of the work itself. And that discomfort, when it's held carefully rather than smoothed away, is often where something real begins.

This is one of the least finished pillars on the site, which feels appropriate. The questions here are live ones.