Joyful Resistance and Radical Rest: The Search for Unicorns
A talk for 'Voices from the East' 26.5.23
Doing things Differently
FE is tough. That’s where I want to start today, because I want you to understand that I’m under no illusions about that. There isn’t enough money and there isn’t enough time to think. I exhausted my body and spirit working in FE for nearly 20 years and I had it easy back then, to how it is for you now.
It’s overwhelming.
We don’t have to pretend that this is OK. Nothing of what I’m going to talk to you about today is about putting on the happy face while being slowly crushed by external forces. That sort of toxic positivity is harmful to our health. But policy change takes time and we can only influence it. As a public service, we are funded on the basis of the political ideology of the day. We can vote and we can get ourselves into positions of influence - as Stuart does - and we can campaign. But at the same time, we only have one life and we spend a lot of it at work.
So let’s accept for the purpose of the next twenty minutes that there isn’t enough money, and that money brings time on the ball. If you can, put those thoughts to one side. There is still plenty that we can do.
Golden Unicorns
When I worked in FE, I was a Golden Unicorn. It’s a thing! In organisational development terms it’s someone with lots of experience and cultural capital, who continues to bring attention, vitality and initiative to the work. Despite a wise VP telling me not to put my trust in any organisation, I gave my all to Northern College. I loved it and I thought I’d be there forever. I didn’t notice the attrition on my health, my hope and my relationships of those sixty hour weeks, that pursuit of perfectionism - after all, what does ‘outstanding’ mean, if not to stand out - that persistent message that nothing I did was ever enough. Until it was suddenly all over and I was forced to recognise how ill I was, in order to be able to heal. Even then, I was a couple of years - and a mini stroke - down the line before I realised I was replicating organisational patterns in my freelance work and I really didn’t have to.
The antidote for me, and for the hundreds of educators who are involved one way or another in the JoyFE collective, has been joyful practice.. We are where we are and we don’t accept it, exactly, we vote, influence and campaign as we can, but we work with what we’ve got. We have to do things differently if we want our working lives - and the opportunities for students - to improve. As the saying goes, if you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
It’s not about working harder. It’s not about resilience - that word has been so misused to coax us into taking on more and more. But intentions are changing, even if working practices are slow to catch up. I don’t need to tell you that we have a new pandemic of ill-health - particularly, but not only, mental ill-health. And we are learning, too, how closely mind, body and spirit are connected.
Joyful Practice
Joyful practice doesn’t lie in the big things. It’s all about small, persistent, consistent acts of joyful resistance. Saying, “I would prefer not to…” Noticing what’s good about people and saying it. Cutting out noise to spend time thinking together. Hearing people’s ideas and giving them serious consideration. Disagreeing agreeably. Taking lunch together. Getting out in nature. Working on a project collaboratively (and making sure everyone has an equal voice). Being critical without being cynical (cynicism is corrosive to joy). It’s about baking joy into our designs from the start. And it’s about radical rest - more of that later.
Because joy - and hope - is in all of us. We just have to wake it up.
Slowly, change happens. We can see it in colleges up and down the country where joyful practice has taken hold. In small pools, maybe, but the ripples spread out. People enjoy going to work more. And students feel that! Now, with AI, we have the opportunity to do what we’ve long said we want to do - streamline the bureaucracy that is drowning us all. Take some of the grind out of meetings, so that they become joyful gatherings, when they happen at all.
The theory of joy comes from an unexpected source. Researching for my PhD I stumbled on the work of 17th century Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. He too lived in dangerous times and he made himself extremely unpopular because of his belief that God wasn’t some beardy bloke on a cloud but actually was in all of us - a life force called joy which is activated when we make connections with one another. It is relational. A joyful connection produces more joy. And - interestingly - he didn’t believe joy just resided in humans, but in everything - animals, trees, bees, rocks. I loved this idea, but I didn’t know what to do with it until I read on. Spinoza also writes about power and because he was writing in Latin he had two words for it
Potestas is what we mean when we talk about power in English - status, rank, hierarchy, clout.
Potentia is that release of joy into practice. Joy as a thing that does. It’s an energy really and I know that sounds woo-woo but think about it. Think about how you feel if you have a joyful lesson, a joyful meeting, a joyful connection. It energises you.
I realised that my work was in enabling people to release their own locked-up potentia, and in helping organisations release the potentia of their staff. That’s the Golden Unicorns work. So many people put a shift in but have lost - or maybe never had - the confidence to speak up and share their ideas, enthusiasm and vigour. Helping them to release their potentia is joyful for us all.
The collective began on the day of lockdown, March 2020, as a phone call between friends. “We have to do something joyful, people’s heads are down.” I’d done a TEDx talk about the ethics of joy and I was already figuring out what a practice of joy might look like. We started a hashtag and by the end of the day had a WhatsApp group of 20 joyful fellow-travellers.
We started to think together, write together, post and broadcast about joy, all the time learning about what joyful practice was. It definitely wasn’t the toxic positivity of ‘everything is awesome’ - sometimes everything is absolutely not awesome. And we love a meme, but a movement can’t march on memes. Three years later, we’ve got some idea of what works.
Consistently repeating messages of shared responsibility.
We all have to do stuff, JoyFE is not just a talking shop.
Noticing verbal and non-verbal, human and non-human messages.
Notice what’s good and then appreciate it.
Shared goose leadership, always someone at the tip of the formation.
Geese take it in turns, and take care of one another.
Even if not intentionally toxic, cliques are excluding and anti-diverse.
Open community always, no long-standing closed working groups.
Gathering around a single value drives energy and purpose.
We don’t have to share a list of values.
Pro-social (community building) practice is integrally anti-competitive.
Competition has its place in sport, but there’s always winners and losers.
Tight timings of a Thinking Environment demonstrate respect and equality.
The discipline of a Thinking Environment is what makes our work not fluffy.
There’s no joy without trust, but there are different kinds of mistrust.
Surfacing tensions by being awkward, brave and kind.
The absolute joy of being in spaces where we don’t have to count numbers.
Counting is capitalism, and it’s capitalism we’re resisting here.
Knowing when to step away is a powerful act of collective leadership.
We follow the joyful energy.
Co-construction processes events into activism.
Activism simply means changing things. No banner carrying is necessary.
It takes a lot of trust-building collective messaging to amplify our voices.
Agreeing to disagree, but sticking to the core message of joy.
JoyFE has no bank account, no central organising core. It fundraises once a year to pay for the Zoom and send out bluebells during Teacher Appreciation Week. You don’t sign up to anything, you just come along and hopefully after a bit you help keep the wheels rolling. JoyFE does not accept paid work. We don’t want to have to count those numbers. We are accountable only to ourselves.
We pour all of this practice into our work with organisations and watch it ripple out. Last year I co-founded two social enterprises to facilitate this. I’m going to tell you a bit about the enterprise I co-founded with Joss Kang, FE Constellations.
Changemaking and Radical Rest
FE Constellations is a membership community for changemakers in FE. Joyful practice is all about changing things. We all want change, even as we fear it. But we want autonomy and influence over that change, we want our lived experiences, knowledge and judgement to be heard.
We began with a paid-for community before we realised that, even in the midst of joyful practice, we’d betrayed one of its tenets: an open invitation to everyone. From 1st July this year, FE Constellations membership will be free to all.
Over the past year, we identified four seasons of changemaking:
Getting Unstuck
Noticing and stepping out of the shackles of now; the often unseen systems, processes and cultures that bind us into doing the same things, over and over.
Releasing Potentia
Freeing those Golden Unicorns; enabling individuals and teams to work with focus, vigour and creativity.
Gaining Clarity
Refocusing around changemaking principles of joy, trust, wellness and hope.
Imagining Unimagined Futures
Co-creating new possibilities.
Each week, changemakers read, listen or watch a thought-provoking artefact, respond to a poll (which always leads to a brilliant conversation) and share what they created that week. Every Friday either Joss or I do a livestream reflecting on the week and sharing the following week’s artefact. It’s not random, it’s all planned out a year in advance and we refresh as we go along - I’m just busy setting up next year’s.
It is genuinely pan-organisational. People gain so much energy and hope from the interactions. Developments for next year include a face-to-face event, more work with organisations, and reasonably priced courses around changemaking, building community - and radical rest
Joyful practice led us to radical rest. We first encountered the term in Shawn A Ginwright’s brilliant book ‘The Four Pivots’ and from there to the exceptional work of The Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey.
Radical Rest helped us understand that rest is political. Both Shawn and Tricia are Black Americans who come from generations of enslaved people, generations of exhaustion, graft and grind. We are all caught up in capitalism, which makes the majority of us work harder for less. We have come to agree with Shawn and Tricia that radical rest is perhaps the most powerful act of joyful resistance we can do. In a recent broadcast with Brené Brown and Simon Sinek, organisational psychologist Adam Grant talked about going to bed early during some collective work on a project. He was challenged the next day by a colleague who said, “I thought you cared about this work?” Adam replied, “I do care. I care enough to do the work when I’m at my best.”
In today’s FE, we are rarely at our best. We are surrounded by noise and bureaucracy and the call for everything to be urgent. Everything is not urgent. FE is not A+E. As individuals, it’s hard to be the one to say, “I need to rest.” Speaking personally, this is particularly true of many neurodivergent people, we easily get into a loop of working till we drop. Collectively, we are stronger. And knowing that the work is a resistance not only to the conditions of our individual lives but - collectively - to the external forces that shape our lives makes us stronger still. As sociologist Dr Kris Marsh says, ““We have to understand how structural forces constrain our personal choices.”
Within the structural forces which dominate our choices in FE, we can set some collective boundaries. Prentis Hemphill defines a boundary as, “A place where I can care for me and also care for you.” In that same podcast with Adam Grant and Simon Sinek, Brené Brown reminds us that setting a boundary is about saying what is OK, and not only what’s not OK. A powerful question to ask ourselves is, “How can I get you what you want and still take care of what I need?”
Shawn Ginwright has three cumulative practices that he recommends, for radical rest:
Ask yourself, “What is my relationship to rest?”
Take an inventory of your rest habits and, to make it a powerful collective practice,
Form a ‘radical rest’ group of colleagues at work, just like a monthly book group, to discuss how to build systems of support for rest.
He reminds us that rest is not “just a personal choice, but a result of structural inequality and cultural beliefs.” A protestant work ethic - which was always, really, about labelling catholics as lazy - does nothing for individuals and nothing to advance the work.
FE Constellations
FE is unique in that it has a flourishing fabric of grassroots communities - constellations. As Rebecca Solnit so powerfully writes, “The stars we are given. The constellations we make.” Even before the pandemic, people were getting together pan-organisationally, over social media and now, face to face, with joyful intentions for sustainable change: FE Research, FE Reading Group, SustainFE, FE Parents, FE Teacher Ed to name just a few. Today is one such constellation. FE Constellations will be offering spaces for people to host their communities as part of our second phase - not for ownership, not for control, but because coming joyfully together strengthens us all.
My friend and business partner Joss is Sikh and one of the guiding principles of FE Constellations is seva, a life-affirming take on ‘service’ which brings joy to all parties, without exhausting one. Respecting not only our personal boundaries but the boundaries of others. In FE, if we care - and most of us still do - we are all too often subject to a “passion tax” - yes, but it’s for the students. We buy into it even as we know it is doing the balance of our lives no good at all. Joyful resistance and radical rest give us a platform with which to release our potentia as Golden Unicorns, bringing joy back into the life-changing work that we do.