Thammasat University students interested in education, sociology, human rights, psychology, anthropology, political science, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 9 January Zoom webinar on Mobilising difficult knowledge in higher education and implications for student futures.
The event, on Thursday, 9 January 2025 at 7:30pm Bangkok time, is presented by the IOE – Faculty of Education and Society, University College London (UCL), the United Kingdom.
Students are invited to register at this link.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of difficult knowledge.
The event announcement notes:
Associate Professor Helen Knowler shares findings from UCL’s Eugenics Legacy Education project (ELEP), thinking through concepts such as accountability, implication, and reparative education.
In this seminar, Helen will discuss what the mobilisation of difficult knowledge means in understanding the history and legacy of eugenics at UCL – and how it can be taught in the context of a relevant curriculum.
She will explore how educators can consider how students are likely to experience strong emotions when they are made aware of this history, and how this learning can be mediated as part of an education strategy. Helen will suggest ways to support staff to work with the complexities of introducing difficult knowledge.
This event will be particularly useful for all those interested the relationship between reparative approaches to education, social justice, and higher education.
Associate Professor Helen Knowler
UCL Arena Centre for Research-based Education
She leads the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) which focuses on developing the educational outcomes of UCL’s Eugenics Inquiry Report. Helen collaborates with colleagues across UCL to explore the ways that UCL’s eugenics history and resources can be incorporated into different disciplinary contexts to support critical engagement with epistemic injustice, reparative pedagogies, and socially just education futures.
Her teaching expertise and research interests are closely aligned and broadly relate to inclusive education. She is interested in the role of educators in developing inclusive education in their own contexts and the ways that professional support and professional learning act as levers for this development.
Difficult knowledge is a theoretical concept that describes the challenges of teaching and learning about social and historical trauma. It can include:
- Representations of trauma
In the curriculum, difficult knowledge can be represented through studies of war, genocide, famine, slavery, and lynching.
- Students’ experiences
Students may encounter difficult knowledge through their own experiences of trauma.
- Embodied knowledge
Difficult knowledge can be a felt theory or way of being in the world that is rooted in traumatic experiences.
Difficult knowledge can be challenging to teach and learn about for a number of reasons, including:
- It can be unsettling and unavoidable.
- It can be highly contested, silenced, or institutionally erased.
- It can be difficult to represent in a curricular context.
- It can evoke traumatic reactions in students.
Here are some ways to approach difficult knowledge in the classroom:
- Offer a variety of options
- Provide students with different ways to learn, such as writing essays, giving presentations, or creating projects.
- Foster a growth mindset
- Emphasize the process of learning, rather than just the outcome.
- Offer extra support
- Provide struggling students with additional support, such as after-school tutoring or one-on-one time with the teacher.
- Continuously assess understanding
- Regularly assess student understanding to identify areas where students need additional support.
In 2021, an article, Teaching Difficult Knowledge of the Korean War through International Children’s Literature, was published in Social Studies and the Young Learner, a publication of the National Council for the Social Studies.
It read in part:
Mainstream textbooks generally shy away from the not-so glorious aspects of U.S. wars. Official curriculum often celebrates these wars by omitting content that might counter the dominant discourse. We fail to ask students to evaluate how the war was fought, whether U.S. military actions were just, and whether the U.S. played a role in creating conditions or conflicts that preceded the war.
Instead, official curriculum tends to focus on key people and dates, with a typically nationalist theme. Many teachers stick to the curriculum and teach war as just another topic to cover. Teachers do so for various reasons. Primarily, many teachers worry about pushback from parents, administrators, or community members for being unpatriotic, anti-American, or anti-military if they teach U.S. wars critically.
Teachers also worry about the psychic damage of the realities of war and try to protect children from the weight of the world. Teachers may also lack content knowledge or the time to teach about U.S. wars through a more critical lens.
Although challenging, it’s vital that we teach about the causes and consequences of wars. The popular belief that U.S. wars are strictly options of last resort ignores concurrent antiwar protests and debates that argued otherwise. The belief by many citizens that their nation’s wars are always moral and honorable hides the complex politics of warfare and the many environmental and human costs, including atrocities, that are the result of war. The belief in war as necessary for the “national interests” is also problematic because it assumes the entire nation shares a single set of interests, and it ignores the brutal consequences faced by marginalized groups.
These dominant-yet-dishonest narratives need to be disrupted in classrooms if we want students to make informed decisions in the future about whether, why, and how our nation should go to war. Otherwise, students are left with only the dominant messages from the larger society.
Teaching about war, then, needs to move beyond just covering the key dates, people, and places included in the official curriculum. Instead, it needs to frame war as “difficult knowledge.” Difficult knowledge refers to social or historical content that carries an emotional burden for students and teachers because the content often involves state-sanctioned violence, refutes broadly accepted versions of the past, and thus creates discomfort or unease. A difficult knowledge approach to teaching about U.S. wars challenges students to explore the realities of war and to further evaluate why the United States went to war, how a war was fought, and what impact a war had on various groups of people.
We must also examine the responsibility of the United States in starting or continuing a war and ask whether there is acknowledgement of the suffering it has caused. For example, the US post-9/11 wars “have forcibly displaced at least 37 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria. This number exceeds the total displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II.
Although it is challenging to provide realistic depictions of war that are appropriate for children, teaching war as difficult knowledge is vital if we want to empower students as “transformers of the world” into a less violent, more peaceful place.
Children’s literature can help teachers address the difficult knowledge of war in an age-relevant way. Unlike textbooks, children’s literature can invite students into a more thorough and honest exploration of war and helps them see the human cost of war, develop empathy, and expand their circle of caring to include those both near and far.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)