Towards An Ethics and Pedagogy of Discomfort: Insensitivity, Perplexity, and Education as

Inclusion.
In this paper I will argue that education as inclusion requires critical interventions in people's actual
lives and actual practices, interrupting their cognitive and affective habits and triggering critical
consciousness and possibilities for change. Only a practical, critical education that is both cognitive
and affective can expand people's sensitivity, that is, their capacity to relate to others and to feel
concerned about social problems even when solving those problems is not immediately and directly
in their interests ( and in some cases it can even be contrary to some of their interests for example,
insofar as privileges and advantages are called into question.). Following John Dewey and
especially Jane Addams, I will vindicate the crucial role of perplexity and discomfort in the
expansion of one's sensitivity: affective growth and the expansion of one's capacity for inclusivity
require that we are put in uncomfortable positions, that we are taken out of our comfort zones, and
that we feel perplexed about challenges that call into question the things that are taken for granted
in our daily lives and ordinary practices. In this sense, I will analyze experiences of discomfort
where the familiar becomes unfamiliar or perplexing as educational experiences that offer the
possibility of ethical growth and can therefore be the learning opportunities for a social ethics that
strives toward inclusion and open-mindedness.
In Education and Social Change John Dewey considered whether our schools and educational
practices << should take an active role in directing social change, and share in the constructionof a
new social order >>. Dewey notes that our schools and educational practices tend to << simply
reflect social changes that have already occurred >>. But, he ask, is that all they should do? He
argues that, given that << the situation is that schools do follow and reflect the social 'order' that
exists >>, they << do take part in the determination of a future social order >> and, therefore, he
concludes:
The problem is not whether the schools should participate in the production of a future society
( since they do so anyway ) but whether they should do it blindly and irresponsibly or with the
maximum possible of courageous intelligence and responsibility.
In this paper I will elucidate this kind of educational courage and educational responsibility with
respect to social change that Dewey is alluding to here. I will discuss such courage and
responsibility in educational practices in the context of thinking of education as inclusion.
Interestingly, inclusion, and more specifically racial integration, was the backdrop of Dewey's essay
and he acknowledges on the first page the heavily discussed problem of integration of the
schoolsin recent years, but this problem recedes to the background in the rest of the essay, which
takes a rather abstract and general tone. In my discussion of education in this essay I will focus at
all times on inclusion, and more specifically on inclusion with respect to racial diversity and with
respect to gender and sexual diversity, although most of what I will say also applies to inclusion
with respect to other dimension of diversity as well ( cultural and linguistic diversity, religious
diversity, diversity of national origin and affiliation, diversity of embodiment and capability).
I take very seriously Dewey's warning at the beginning of his essay that educational structures and
practices are always producing new societies, even if they tend to replicate the existing social
structures and to maintain the status quo by simply reflecting social changes that have already
occurred and resisting new changes. These are what I call pedagogical practices of comfort that
focus on what is already familiar, on accepted changes. Such practices tend to obscure the
limitations and problems of those established changes. They also obscure the possibilities of new
social changes because they block the questioning of the social order. Given their lack of critical
scrutiny, these pedagogical practices of comfort fall into what Dewey describes as participating in
the production of a future society blindly and irresponsibly. We need more lucid and responsible
educational practices: we need educationalpractices that disrupt the comfort of the quotidian,

everyday, and ordinary; we need critical interventions that wake us up and uproots what has an air
of familiarity in our life, so that it is rendered unfamiliar again and we can approach it with fresh
and critical eyes. This is what I mean by an ethics and pedagogy of discomfort, an ethics and
pedagogy that gives center-stage to experiences of perplexity and discomfort so that the familiar
becomes estranged and new learning opportunities arise for the expansion of our social sensibilities.
The inspiration for such an ethics and pedagogy of discomfort is not only Dewey, but also and
especially - Jane Addams.
A central intuition in Jane Addams's plea for a deeply social ethics in Democracy and Social Ethics
is that perplexity and self-estrangement are of the utmost importance for cognitive, affective, ethical
and political learning, that the expansion of our democratic sensibilities depend on them. The
different chapters in this often neglected American philosophical classic are structured around
different experiences of perplexity, examining the productive ethical use that we can make of these
experiences. But what is the connection between perplexity and ethical learning? As Charlene
Seigfried has emphasized, Addams was a pioneer in taking women's experiences and oppressive
conditions as central for the development of ethical theory, thus giving robust social content to the
pragmatist ethical theory that was emerging at the time in the works of William James and John
Dewey. As Seigfried argues, Addams's ethical approach converges with those of Dewey and James
in establishing an intimate connection between perplexity and social sympathy in processes of
ethical learning. As Seigfried puts it: << All three show how social sympathy can be aroused and
developed through the perplexities we feel in the normal course of everyday life, specifically those
caused by the clashes of belief, habits, and interests inevitable in highly diversified societies>>.
The experiential disruptions that arise in interaction with significantly different others are precious
opportunities for developing an awareness of our interdependence and a critical consciousness of
the limitations of our perspective vis--vis that of others. By seeking these experiences of perplexity
and disruption and using them as a mechanism of learning we can cultivate a social sensibility that
opens our eyes, ears, and hearts to other ways of thinking, feeling, and living. This kind of social
learning is, for the pragmatists, the driving force of moral development. As Dewey puts it, <<
interest in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential moral interest>>.
As Seigfried explains, for Addams, <<'a perplexity' refers to someone's personal involvement in a
situation that baffles and confuses her, because her usual understanding and responses are
inadequate to explain or trasform a troubling situation>>.
The perplexed subject is confronted with a difficult existential choice: to continue to hold onto her
assumptions or to begin to call them into question. If she chooses the latter, she must << undergo a
painful process of rethinking her presuppositions and value>>. For Addams, perplexity is the kind
of existential discomfort that goes to the very roots, to the normative grounding of one's life, and
constitutes the initial stage of ethical inquiry. As Seigfried puts it, in her discussions of perplexity
Addams << gives a nuanced account of the interplay of personal feelings and objective conditions;
of the difficulties involved in responding to other classes, races, and culture; and of the choice
involved in the ways one responds to challenges to accepted beliefs and familiar values>>. Addams
explains the productive work and learning processes that can result from the existential disruptions
and perplexities experienced by the charity workers she collaborated with in Chicago in the 1920's.
Addams criticizes the unexamined racism and classism that distorted the social perceptions of the
well- intentioned charity workers. She saw as a constant source of miscommunication and distorted
social perception in the failure to reflect critically on the racial and class gaps that existed between
the charity workers and the recipients of that charity in destitute inner-city neighborhoods. This is
how Addams describes the perplexity of a reflective charity worker: she << is continually surprised
to find that the safest platitude may be challenged>>; and << she discovers how incorrigibly
bourgeois her standards have been, and it takes but a little time to reach the conclusion that she
cannot insist so strenuously upon the conventions of her own class, which fail to fit the bigger, more
emotional, and freer lives of working people>>.
Collaborative processes of ethical and political learning can be prompted by experiences of
perplexity of this sort. This is how Seigfried summarizes the kind of learning that Addams saw as

required by the proper resolution of these experiences: << What is needed to satisfactorily resolve
the perplexity is better insight into the social requirements of a genuine democracy and the
implementation of a cooperative experimental approach >>.
The cultivation of perplexity that Addams recommends is the cultivation of our openness to being
challenged and affected by other experiential perspectives. This critical experiential approach
involves an ethical imperative: the imperative to renew our perplexities and to reinvigorate our
openness to alternative standpoints, the imperative to constantly expand our personal as well as
shared perspectives and sensibilities. Only when we live up to such imperative can we contribute to
the formation of pluralistic communities and open publics that are committed to inclusion and social
justice. The expansion of social sensibilities through the cultivation of perpkexity facilitates
pluralistic forms of solidarity. We are interested in the cultivation of perplexity and in educational
practices and habits that resist comfort because they are the heart and soul of solidarity, of social
empathy and a social ethics. It is in and through discomfort (i.e. Through the disruption of the
familiar and taken for granted) that we discover new possibilities of social relationality by paying
attention to new forms of social identification understood, following Naomi Scheman, as ways of
identifying-with, not of identifying-as. This is much more than a mere attempt to resuscitate oldfashioned identity politics. The ethics and pedagogy of discomfort offers a more complex path for
our cognitive-affective and socio-political melioration. Through practices of perplexity and
discomfort ( or resisting comfort) we can learn to go beyond the strictures of inherited cognitive and
affective habits, and we can learn to envision new cognitive-affective attitudes and orientations
toward other. Both our ability and our inability to relate to others ( and to particular aspects of
ourselves) is mediated by social arrangements and practices that opens our eyes and hearts to
certain people and certain problems and not to others, enabling and constraining our social gaze. We
all have responsibilities towards the expansion and pluralization of this social gaze so that we can
collectively produce more inclusive sensibilities.
Nobody can be exempted from the responsibilities that stem from this ethics and pedagogy of
discomfort. But, interestingly, the privileged subject who are less inclined and worse equipped to
resist inherited habits of social perception, those who find their experiences and perspectives most
obvious and unproblematic, are precisely the ones who should bear a heightened responsibility and
should make special efforts to resist and undo the exclusions and marginalizations inscribed in their
social sensibility. As feminist theorists and race theorists have argued in the recent literature,
privileged subject should play a specisl role in the fight against racism and heterosexism, which
should start with their own self-problematization, that is, with the problematization of their social
gaze and of their privileged perspectives and privileged lives. However, the shared burdens of
fighting insensitivity should not disproportionately fall on the shoulders of any single group or
particular range of subject positions , but on the entire collective social body. It is of the utmost
importance that there be good relations of communication among social groups so that there can be
a collective process of learning in which the trajectories of differently situated subject can enrich
each other. We need a well communicated social body so that we can all share experiences, compare
and contrast perspectives, learn about the insights and limitations of differently situated social
gazes, and engage in the difficult process of social learning across differences. This essay hopes to
contribute to a better understanding of our educational responsibilities in the collective fight against
exclusions and the pursuit of justice.
In the next section I will offer an analysis of social insensitivity, identifying the kind of critical
intervention that our educational practices need to bring about in order to uproot insensitivity and to
expand our capacity for solidarity. From this analysis I will conclude, in section 3, that we need an
ethics and pedagogy of discomfort to live up to our responsibilities with respect to social justice.
A great deal of social interaction happens in the dark, with people acting blindly toward each other
and exhibiting a stubborn resistance to recognize crucial aspects of each other's identities and lives.
What are our educational responsibilities with respect to this social blindness or insensitivity? How
can we detect the limitations and dysfunctions of our social gaze and design educational

interventions to change them?