It is a Thursday morning in February. Students arrive at school while teachers are readying their classrooms, preparing for the day. In class 5B, students will start with a biology lesson on blood pressure. The teacher is making some last-minute changes to the lesson materials as students are entering the classroom. 

One student is sobbing and is surrounded by a group of classmates who are trying to soothe their friend. Just as the teacher wants to ask the group to settle down, someone angrily shouts at the crying student: “There are too many immigrants in our country. You should go back to where you came from!” 

The whole class turns awkwardly silent for a few seconds. 

The teacher takes a deep breath while thinking to herself: “I don’t have time for this. I have a whole chapter to get through today. How do I deal with this?” 

Difficult knowledge

The example above is much more than what we might call a “teachable moment”; it’s an illustration of what researchers Deborah Britzman and Alice Pitt call “difficult knowledge”. 

They use this term to refer to the impact of new knowledge entering into contact with a person’s held beliefs and affecting one’s sense of self in the process. Difficult knowledge, they suggest, has both cognitive and emotional consequences, because it is “meant to signify both representations of social trauma in curriculum and the individual’s encounters with them in pedagogy”. 

In Britzman and Pitt’s terms, the integration of this new knowledge contains “a kernel of trauma” that must be addressed and overcome in order for learning to take place. 

If we take our earlier example, the teachable moment - that would occur alongside actions according to the school’s behaviour policy - stemming from the angry student’s outburst might be a discussion around the questions: how can immigrants build a sense of belonging and how can host communities develop an understanding of the situation these immigrants find themselves in? 

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Getting to the point of nuanced discussion, however, isn’t easy, because, according to Britzman and Pitt, difficult knowledge involves three “psychical problems”: an intense life event, the person’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and the force of its aftereffects. 

So, how do we translate the emotive reactions that difficult knowledge generates into learning?

Make space in the curriculum

For difficult knowledge to have a place in classrooms, we must first consider how we create space for it within the curriculum. 

American researcher, Ted Aoki, recommends that we approach the curriculum as a “lived experience” or a “complicated conversation”, which challenges teachers and students to grapple with, negotiate, and question their assumptions, knowledge and experiences. 

This approach draws on the work of education theorist William Pinar, who advocates putting the focus of the curriculum on interactions between students and teachers, rather than on the information to be imparted. 

By viewing the curriculum in this way - as something dynamic, requiring active engagement and the recognition of complexity, uncertainty and trauma - we create space for instances of difficult knowledge to be acknowledged. 

Rather than avoiding the “psychical” problems associated with difficult knowledge, we suggest that teachers engage with them directly: confronting situations like the one described in the opening example head-on. 

Curriculum planning needs to leave enough flexibility for these ad-hoc moments to occur, though. Teachers shouldn’t feel that they need to simply shut instances of difficult knowledge down in order to get on with the learning that was planned. 

Provide pupils with scaffolds

Engaging with difficult knowledge directly will support students in developing a nuanced understanding of their roles, responsibilities and perspectives as individuals co-existing with one another.

In order to help students with this process, teachers need to provide them with a scaffolded learning experience that will allow them to navigate instances of emotional and cognitive dissonance. This can’t be introduced on the spot, but rather needs to be planned into the curriculum as prior learning. One way to do this might be through design-based education (DBE).

DBE requires a purposeful initial phase of empathising with beliefs, worldviews and opinions held by different stakeholders in relation to a specific problem question. For example, in a project recently piloted in our international teacher training programme, a history and social geography class was asked to design a memorial that was situated in a specific place and time.

The empathising phase for the memorial project led students to consider potential reactions to their memorial based on research into how beliefs and value priorities shape how people understand events from the past and respond to them in the present. For example, one group of students wished to create a memorial to honour people who had lost their lives attempting to reach Europe following the war in Syria. 

“Empathising” with views held by anti-immigrant groups in Northern Europe to explore how members of the public might react to the memorial did not change the design or purpose of the memorial, but led the students to the difficult knowledge that an open society must allow space for the expression of views that others might find abhorrent.  

The purpose of this phase was not to find a solution to the problem question that would accommodate all views - indeed the contested nature of memorials was part of the exploration - but to raise levels of awareness of how deeply held beliefs inform actions and reactions. 

We view this phase as one way to embed and support the complicated conversations of a lived curriculum. We suggest that empathic engagement around a historical topic can help students sort through the aftereffects of difficult knowledge when it takes them by surprise.

Viewing curriculum as a lived experience that offers a space for difficult knowledge implies a particular view on the role of the teacher, and schooling more broadly. An often-heard adage is that schools should prepare students for the future and help them to become active members of society. Yet, what happens on a Thursday morning in February is of no less significance because it concerns the immediate present instead of a far-away future. The impact of such a difficult moment cannot be postponed. Students are co-existing in a complex present that speaks to them and requires a response.

With a curriculum that makes space for such moments, and the right scaffolding, students can work through the aftereffects of difficult knowledge in a way that will help them to understand and respond more thoughtfully, and in a nuanced manner, in the future. 

Debra Williams-Gualandi and Elke Van dermijnsbrugge are lecturers in international teacher education at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands