The Well-Being Talking Shop

Pour yourself a glass of wine. Sit down. Put your feet up. It’s time to relax. Put some music on. Forget your worries: the classes, the planning and marking, the commuting.

Take some time for yourself and your own well-being.

Because you matter. You’re worth it.

Now it’s all about you.

What’s wrong with this? Nothing. We all need to rest, to retreat, to recharge our batteries and chill out. Working with people is tiring, and many of us are expected to do more with less resources, less money, in less time.

And well-being is the new buzzword, it seems. Sarah Mercer gave a plenary on the topic last year, International House just hosted a Well-Being Season, and there have been several blog posts on mindfulness, self-care, and other related topics. Politically, back in 2010 David Cameron even announced well-being metrics would be used to guide public policy.

Now just to make this clear, I’ve no problem with teachers feeling in control, being healthy, or feeling good. My problem is that current conditions determine, to a large extent, who gets to feel good. And the existence of such conditions cannot be wished away by meditation, self-care, or positive thinking.

This is exactly the worry shared by one of the respondents in Phil Longwell’s recent research:

 

‘I’m worried that too much of a focus on the psychology and well-being of teachers detracts from the broader systemic issues that cause these issues in the first place.’

Some background. Well-being has entered ELT at a time when teachers have been demanding greater visibility and acceptance of issues such as mental health, poor working conditions, non-native speaker and gender equality. (Well-being has also entered politics at a time of widening inequality, and political polarization.)

Yet to subsume these issues under a catch-all category does them a disservice. Because as soon as we put these issues under the well-being umbrella, they effectively vanish in a cloud of conceptual mist—and lose their sharp edges.

Because well-being itself cannot be defined precisely other than a general desire for ‘the good life’. At its core, it’s an imprecise concept at best. Aristotle’s notion of the good life was concerned with the connection between virtue, or practical wisdom (arete), and happiness (eudaimonia). Happiness was achieved through the cultivation of good habits and virtues; such virtues lead to a ‘flourishing’ life.

Who can argue with that?

Yet as post-colonial and feminist critics have pointed out, Ancient Greece itself was no democracy. It was a slave state—where women, foreigners, and men without property had no rights. Well-being was only something accessible to the owners of capital and the owners of people.

How do you think Aristotle had time to sit around and think of concepts? 

And although well-being may give you a concept for thinking about individual happiness, it’s a poor concept to think about collective happiness, and what is just. As Amartya Sen points out, a person’s sense of well-being is dependent on their experience of life. And there’s the problem of what he calls ‘adaptive preferences’. That is, the poor will often settle for less well-being than the rich. This makes the concept, in some ways, redundant—as you simply end up with rich people having more well-being, poor people having less.

‘People can internalize the harshness of their circumstances so that they do not desire what they can never expect to achieve.’ 

To work out why the poor are the poor; why the precarious are the precarious; and why the rich are the rich you need a framework that explains structures, and that asks questions that include politics, economics, and class. 

Why does ELT exist?  –  Why is English now a global lingua franca?

Why does inequality in ELT exist?  – Is there are a reason why male ELT teachers often get paid more than women?

Why are some teachers poor? – What is it that prevents teachers from being paid a living wage?

As Ian Bache, professor of politics at Sheffield University, explains in a 2017 paper: 

‘Without considering the relationship of wellbeing to the wider economic and political context, the use of abstract wellbeing theories in policy discussions, however well meaning, risk speaking past everyday experiences and struggles. Moreover, they do not provide guidance on how to effect political change to advance wellbeing.’

Therefore, my worry is that all the talk on well-being will not do anything to change systemic problems in ELT – the economic foundations of a system that cause the crappy working conditions, the stress, anxiety and mental exhaustion – and may act more to forestall change than start it. 

Because pseudo-wisdom can only lead to pseudo-change; a move to subsume mental health, burnout, nervous exhaustion under the category of ‘well-being’ is a rhetorical move, and not a real one. It leaves existing relations intact, with no change.

On International Workers’ Day, perhaps the best thing we can do is start to talk about system change through collective action.

And deeds, rather than words.

Us, rather than you.