Ghostwriting journal 1: why discomfort?

A series of journals in which Lance Peng contemplates his teaching practice.

There’s something deliciously strange about lecturing from a glowing rectangle while my colleague, the ever-brilliant Dr Jeremy Chang, holds court in the flesh, oceans away. Together we co-teach a course titled Dark Pedagogy for master’s and PhD students at the Institute of Education, National Sun Yat-sen University. He walks among them, I haunt them from afar (a spectral presence through Wi-Fi) and it’s all very on brand.

Ghostwriting journals began with a quiet haunting.....not of the supernatural kind but the digital and I appear to students only through a luminous portal: half-there, half-not. It struck me that this is what teaching across worlds feels like: ghosting, in the most affectionate sense. I speak, they listen; I vanish, yet my slides perhaps linger like a trace? Maybe this is the truest form of ghostwriting: to write oneself into a room one can never quite enter.

And yet, I am deeply present....emotionally, intellectually, mischievously.

Why discomfort?

My first session was titled Why Discomfort? and began, quite suitably, with a notion from bell hooks:

“Education is not about comfort; it is about awakening”

I asked the students to imagine that the classroom was not a sanctuary of certainty but a séance, a gathering of living minds and lingering ghosts. “What if learning” I suggested, “requires a little haunting?”

I introduced dark pedagogy as a way of learning through unease: of lingering with the awkward, the uncertain, the faintly humiliating. Not harm, but productive friction. I quoted bell hooks again (because one must!?): Transgressive teaching requires both love and struggle.

It does, doesn’t it? Love without struggle is just comfort; struggle without love is cruelty. The art lies in balancing the two: a gothic pedagogy of tenderness and trouble.

The socks that launched my thousand thoughts

I told them my sock story. In Year 12 my school decreed that all socks must be black or white. No stripes, no colours, no fun. I, being a colourful-socks sort of person, felt absurdly crushed. It wasn’t rebellion so much as aesthetic despair. My ankles had opinions! But there it was: uniformity as virtue.

That tiny discomfort (the quiet suffocation of colour!) lingered. Years later, as I teach about dark pedagogy I realise it was my first encounter with how institutions police not just bodies but imaginations. All those “small rules” that supposedly keep order.....dress codes, “good behaviour”, neat handwriting are all ghosts of bigger systems of control.

One student spoke of learning piano under a disciplinarian teacher (endless scales, no joy) and her vow to teach music differently, to make it about love not punishment. Another recalled the public humiliation of being summoned to the board, swearing she’d never inflict that on her pupils. And another described how her school routinely stole hours from art, PE and music to cram for exams, as if creativity were a luxury, not a language.

Our collective discomfort became a séance of sorts....a chorus of tiny hauntings and the ghosts of education past.

The pedagogy of discomfort

We then turned to Megan Boler’s idea: the pedagogy of discomfort. I told them discomfort is a compass. When we flinch, something valuable is being touched. It’s where our histories and values collide: the exact place learning happens.

I reminded them (and myself): the goal isn’t to shame or suffer but to notice.

Silence, too, is part of the haunting. A good ghost knows when to linger.

The haunted school

As we explored hauntology via Merlin Coverley I asked: what ghosts stalk our classrooms? Old policies, impossible standards, the myth of the “ideal student”?

Every school is a haunted house really. The bells, the uniforms, the teacher’s desk at the front....all relics of past pedagogies. We inherit them, inhabit them and occasionally exorcise them. Our task, I think, is not to banish the ghosts but to teach with them to invite them in for tea and an honest conversation.

Learning from the shadows

We ended with a collective reflection:

“To teach is to be haunted by what we once were and by what we still might become”

Darkness, I told them, is not danger but depth. Discomfort isn’t failure; it’s thinking with feeling.

So that’s Ghostwriting journal 1: my first haunting of the term. A toast to discomfort, to haunted classrooms and to the hope that somewhere, a student is secretly wearing colourful socks!