Engaging with difficult knowledge in teaching in post-truth era: from theory to practice within diverse disciplinary areas

A large body of research has examined the implications of engagement with difficult knowledge across a range of areas in education including multi-cultural and anti-racist (teacher) education (Carson and Johnston 2000; Zembylas and Papamichael 2017), gender education (Cahill and Dadvand 2020; Robinson and Davies 2008), Indigenous education (Kerr 2014; Mcconaghy 2003) and history education (Lehrer, Milton, and Patterson 2011; Levy and Sheppard 2018). Despite the rich and growing body of work, debates about difficult knowledge in teaching and learning remain largely constrained within disciplinary boundaries and face the challenge associated with translating theory into practice effectively.

This special issue addresses this gap focusing on the often-under-acknowledged dimensions of educators’ work when they are called upon to engage with and re-present difficult knowledge. The overarching aim is to advance scholarship in the application of theory to practice in discussions about difficult knowledge by: (1) making visible the complex ways in which personal, social, material, institutional, ideological, historical factors create affective entanglements and mediate pedagogical responses to difficult knowledge and (2) extrapolating pedagogical offerings from scholarship across different disciplinary areas in education to inform a more coherent response to the challenges that educators face when engaging with forms of difficult knowledge.

This special issue is born out of our interest in advancing the use of theory to inform practice in the field of teaching and teacher education. The special issue is also driven by a shared desire to address different forms of injustice through praxis-based and productive encounters with difficult knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. At the backdrop of our discussions about difficult knowledge in teaching and learning lie two challenges associated with the current rise of ‘post-truth’ politics and the increasing social, political, economic and environmental uncertainties, which have made the need for effective educational responses ever more urgent. The enduring and evolving nature of these challenges have intensified calls to open up new ways of thinking about responsibility and solidarity with ‘the other’ beyond one’s personal, spatial and temporal contexts.

Engaging with difficult knowledge in the age of post-truth politics

As we begin the third decade of the twenty-first century, truth-making claims in social and political life enter a new phase. The notion that we live in an age of ‘post-truth’ has nearly become common sense by now. The term ‘post-truth’, word of the year in 2016, denotes ‘circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’, according to the Oxford Dictionaries. Post-truth, then, marks a mode of social and political life in which the value of truth is declining, often under the disguise of legitimate scepticism (D’ Ancona 2017). In this sense, rationality and truth are replaced with falsehood, fake news, sentimentalism, and conspiracy theories. This is evident in discussions of numerous ‘difficult’ issues and events troubling societies in recent years, ranging from climate change, Covid-19, Brexit, Trump’s election and presidency in the US, right-wing populism, racism, sexism and colonialism – a number of these issues are addressed in this special issue. Although many of these issues are clearly not ‘new’, as much as tensions around truth are not a contemporary problem, there is a new urgency and complexity to these matters as a result of new conditions for public communication.

Over the past few years, numerous academic journals in a broad variety of disciplines have devoted editorials, special issues and articles to the phenomenon of ‘post-truth’, discussing the challenges it poses to their respective fields and the explanations and possible remedies they have on offer (Braun and Dodge 2018). What does this mean for educational studies? How do these issues and events relating to post-truth constitute difficult knowledge in education? What can engagement with difficult knowledge in post-truth era illuminate for our work as researchers, teacher educators and educators more generally? Linking difficult knowledge to questions of post-truth, the authors of this special issue traverse a variety of disciplinary areas of scholarship that address the deepest elements of our being: the epistemological, the affective, the ontological, and the ethical. These are the multifaceted and complex sites of struggling to make sense of our thoughts, feelings, and emotions in the face of what is difficult and uncomfortable.

Britzman’s (e.g., 1998, 2000, 2013; Britzman and Pitt 2004; Pitt and Britzman 2003) landmark notion of ‘difficult knowledge’ has set out numerous educational studies over the years to explore the process of engaging with what makes us uncomfortable. Even after more than two decades of research in this area, it is hard to pin difficult knowledge down and say ‘this’ is difficult knowledge or this is what makes knowledge difficult (see also, Garrett 2017). Throughout her work, Britzman has described difficult knowledge as representations of social and historical traumas in the curriculum (epistemological layer) as well as the learner’s affective encounters with them in pedagogy (affective layer). Scholars who have taken up this notion over the years have made significant contributions towards understanding how certain knowledge becomes difficult under certain social and political conditions. More importantly, perhaps, this research has explored questions of how to make difficult knowledge pedagogical, namely, how to confront issues of racism, sexism, colonialism and other discomforting issues involving trauma, loss and suffering in pedagogically sensitive and ethical ways.

Difficult knowledge is unsettling yet unavoidable, especially in a post-truth era in which many difficult issues such as racism, climate change or gender-violence cut across public discussions in many societies. Despite growing scholarship on difficult knowledge over the years, a key remaining challenge is how trauma, loss and suffering can be approached in pedagogically productive ways – that is, in ways that do not simply ‘deal with’ such knowledge instrumentally, superficially or sentimentally as the champions of post-truth would like us to do, but rather in action-oriented ways, namely, in ways that provoke transformative praxis and attempt to repair the individual and collective suffering emerging from post-truth times. Productive pedagogies, from this perspective, require that we look at the multidimensional, contradictory and evolving nature and consequences of difficult knowledge across social, political and disciplinary domains. This perspective also suggests that we carefully analyse and develop our pedagogical capacities to engage with the inevitable effects of troubled knowledge on our bodies, minds and hearts. Such a complex task demands that we abandon the disciplinary silos of exploring the teaching of difficult knowledge or the antagonistic divide between theory and practice.

Research from diverse disciplinary areas in the study of difficult knowledge shows the multifaceted and interconnected pedagogical attempts to resolve the dilemmas, tensions and complexities emerging from facing what makes human beings and societies uncomfortable when they face difficult issues. Bringing together theory and practice on difficult knowledge in this special issue creates important openings of ethical and political potential in educators’ efforts to make productive pedagogical interventions. Insofar as the teaching and learning about and from difficult knowledge becomes a viable pedagogical tool for addressing trauma, loss and suffering, educators are enabled to raise new questions and enact new possibilities – questions and possibilities that pay attention to how the ‘difficult’ can expand rather than diminish the ethical and political field in which educators and students move. A major issue, then, in the future research on difficult knowledge and education is how to turn these questions and possibilities into pedagogical spaces for ethical encounters and political engagements that have the potential to bring change – e.g., how pedagogical spaces may become the locus of solidarity, hospitality, relationality, intersectionality, and interdependence.

Exploring possibilities for transformative education

The articles in this special issue show these powerful possibilities by illustrating the transformative potentials of certain pedagogical interventions to address forms of difficult knowledge in the classroom within different disciplinary areas. For example, a key idea that emerges from several articles (e.g., see Zembylas; Bryan; Keddie; Tupper and Mitchell) is that evidentiary epistemologies are not enough to address difficult issues like fake news and conspiracy theories that flourish in post-truth times. As much as evidence, fact-checking, and logic do not drive people towards post-truth, it is unlikely that these same strategies will drive them away from these beliefs (see also, Zembylas 2021).

What this means pedagogically in handling difficult issues in the classroom such as climate change, historical trauma, or gender-based violence is that it is crucial to create affective spaces that reinvent affective relations with others, thus moving beyond the limitations of pedagogical strategies grounded in narrow epistemic terms. In other words, we need to explore pedagogical interventions, which pay attention to both the epistemic and affective complexities of difficult knowledge emerging in specific post-truth settings. Educators, informed by this emerging work on difficult knowledge, can offer practical solutions that invoke an affective rupture with the ways their students engage with difficult knowledge in a post-truth era. This affective rupture can be the beginning for ethical and political encounters with others that have the potential to bring even minor changes through cultivating action-oriented empathy, conviviality, solidarity, and response-ability.

Frameworks for complexity and contingency

In the face of the distressing and politically destabilising nature of difficult knowledge, the authors suggest pedagogical approaches, which work to reveal the interconnectedness of the personal and the structural, the genealogical and the discursive, and the inter-threading of systems of power with systems of knowledge production. A focus on the genealogical is necessary as difficult knowledges of racism, colonialisation, gender inequality, violence and climate crisis have long histories. They have structural and political drivers. They accrue, and are re-enacted over time, with intergenerational effects. A focus on the discursive is important to engage with the ways in which dominant storylines and ideologies work to shape the imaginary of what can or should be made possible in the future. A focus on power and justice is necessary to recognise that groups and individuals are differently and inequitably affected by discrimination, trauma and intergenerational forms of oppression.

This requires the use of holistic cognitive frameworks such as Bryan’s use of an ecological framework (following Bronfenbrenner) which shows nested interconnectedness between the micro world of everyday encounters and the operations and influence of institutions and macro forces of economy, culture, media and ideologies. This model also identifies the way in which historical events shape what happens throughout the system of interconnected influences. Cahill and Dadvand favour the use of the metaphor of the affective assemblage (following Deleuze) to point to the constellation of material, discursive, affective and institutional factors that function in machinic like ways to produce the bounded conditions that constrain responses to gender-based violence. They demonstrate uses of assemblage thinking to inform a learning design within which embodied dramatisations are used to help people recognise operations of different elements of the assemblage. Tupper and Mitchell advance a reconciliatory framework by drawing on medicine wheel teachings, an ontological model that opens the way for a more holistic conceptualisation of persons as connected to the world, its land and peoples, and its history.

The frameworks for thinking variously offered by the ecological model, the assemblage and the medicine wheel each function in metaphoric ways to house complexity, multiplicity, interconnectedness and simultaneity. Use of such frameworks invites rhizomatic endeavours in which affective and cognitive engagement with multiplicity and complexity is used as a means of evoking compassionate forms of recognition within a process of coming to know.

Affective learning via experiential and embodied pedagogies

The contributors to this special issue recommend use of aesthetic, experiential and relational modes of learning through narratives, rituals, visual arts, and dramatisation. Storytelling offers a means through which to connect the personal to the structural. Tupper and Mitchell find that stories of lived and historical experience and teachings about traditional culture as shared by an Indigenous Elder help them to engage with the ways in which colonisation and genocide persist as trauma and loss in the present day. Similarly, Zembylas finds that stories told by members of the police forces were better able to foster collective recognition of practices of violence as well as heroic contributions. Collective engagement in dramatisation can also provide a powerful tool through which to examine the ways in which societal norms and institutionalised practices work to shape actions in the every day. This is demonstrated in Cahill and Dadvand’s tracing of the factors that constrain disclosure and help-seeking and limit use of supportive interpersonal and institutional responses to gender-based violence.

Embodied experiential encounters can produce powerful forms of sensory and affective response, which can in turn dislodge defensive resistance to engaging with difficult knowledge. As Keddie illustrates, when young men enter the performance space of the ‘man box’ in which voices assail them with confining masculinity scripts, they more readily engage in authentic discussion about the ways in which harmful masculinity norms impact their own lives. The visual arts also provide affectively powerful pedagogical tools. Bryan demonstrates ways in which artistic depictions of climate damage can capture with poignancy both beauty and suffering, and in this mobilise responsive action.

The contributors to this edition presume that encounters with difficult knowledge should be undertaken in service of a pedagogy for social change. Hence, to have been moved but not moved to action means that the ethical goal of the educative encounter has not been accomplished. Dealing with difficult knowledge requires a pedagogy, which reaches beyond the goal of personal growth or development of interpersonal skills (see Davies and Buscott) to encompass forms of collective response-ability (see Keddie). Part of the discomfort of encountering difficult knowledge lies in coming to see the ways in which we are implicated and affected (see Bryan) and bridging the ‘distance’ that protects us from distress of our implication in the suffering of the other (see Stoddard). It is this preference for distance (temporal and spatial) that educators and learners need to transcend in their efforts to relate to the other without assuming a position of shared identity (Hemmings 2012).

For this learning to be enabling, and to contribute towards redress and restoration, it must engender critical, compassionate and ethical relationality. Becoming response-able is a process in which the relational work of care leads to the possibility of ethical action (see Zembylas). Recognising mutual vulnerability creates conditions for respect and care (see Cahill and Dadvand, and Tupper and Mitchell). It calls for courage and humility in the face of the limitations that constrain one’s capacity to be and to know. The relationality and response-ability called for is not only oriented towards enabling quality interpersonal relationships enacted in the present but also a focus on relatedness with conditions affecting unknown persons in history, and unknown and yet unborn persons of future times. This calls for a combination of affective and critical engagement with knowledge that will help people to learn with, from and for each other.

Offerings from contributions in this special issue

In various ways, papers in this special issue return to two questions initially posed by Pitt and Britzman (2003), namely what makes knowledge difficult (and for whom), and how to narrate difficult knowledge. These are, by no means, easy questions to answer, especially in the present context of increased anxieties about myriads of challenges facing us as a collective which have reinvigorated debates about the limits of critical inquiry in countering post-truth claims (Schindler 2020). The authors contributing to this special issue build upon and advance these debates by teasing out complexities, contingencies and tensions involved in encountering difficult knowledge within different disciplinary areas. They demonstrate how encountering and re-presenting difficult knowledge require not only interfering with the self as subject and object of critique but also engaging with the other to whom our relationship is marked by our simultaneous inter-dependence and distance.

Michalinos Zembylas’ paper opens the special issue by highlighting how discussions about race and racism can amount to a form of difficult knowledge. Drawing on his experiences in providing a course on anti-racist education to a group of police officers in Cyprus, Zembylas demonstrates the limits of evidentiary epistemologies in dealing with post-truth claims and instead highlights the need for cultivating affective solidarity. Attention to affects in pedagogical encounters with difficult knowledge is also a key area of interest in Helen Cahill and Babak Dadvand’s article. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) and Butler’s (2004, 2007) work, the authors map out the affective, discursive, institutional and material forces that mediate teacher responses to accounts of gender-based violence. Cahill and Dadvand also demonstrate how collective and embodied modes of enquiry can help foster professional readiness in teachers in professional learning events.

Audrey Bryan’s paper draws on Rothberg’s (2020) notion of the implicated subject to show how the individual-private is tightly entwined with state-corporate in the climate crisis. Bryan offers the Social Ecology of Responsibility Framework as a basis for building solidarity with the other with whom we share the planet. Hauling further into attention one’s own implications within different temporalities of injustice, Jennifer Tupper and Tana Mitchell turn to the impact of colonialism for Indigenous peoples to demonstrate the importance of truth-telling in decolonising Western epistemologies. This requires, as the authors discuss, a holistic approach that invites teachers and learners to experience connections with land and the community. Similarly, Larissa McLean Davies and Lucy Buzacott discuss how disrupting colonial, patriarchal and heteronormative canonical narratives through text requires an alternative approach that expands our relations with the other – not as passive spectator of their suffering but as situated within the racialising and colonising practices.

Jeremy Stoddard’s article highlights the importance temporality and our own positioning in thinking about traumatic histories. Stoddard engages conceptually with theories of memory and notions of distance and identity as well as contributions from critical, socio-cultural and psychoanalytic approaches to offer possibilities for productive classroom engagement with traumatic events and historical injustices. Amanda Keddie’s paper exposes the complexities of emotions as they pertain to gender-justice work in school settings. Tracing the emotional intensities involved in engaging boys in gender education initiatives, Keddie follows Zembylas in reminding us of the importance of pedagogic discomfort, mutual vulnerability and the value of strategic empathy and ethical self-reflection in creating productive pedagogical spaces for engagement with gender-justice initiatives.

Implications for the field

For future research on difficult knowledge across disciplinary areas of learning, we highlight the importance of examining difficult knowledge as a site of ethical and political transformation – that is, as a space that explores how educators may diversify their pedagogical tools for addressing the traumas, losses and sufferings of post-truth era while engendering ethical and moral responsibility in their students. Paying attention to how everyday relationalities in schools and universities instil certain affective modalities and inhibit or enable the creation of particular affective relations could be the starting point for exploring new pedagogical practices that actively promote solidarity, responsibility, and care for the other. This task would appear to be particularly urgent in contemporary post-truth times in which educators in different subject-matter areas need to constantly invent new strategies that create possibilities for more ethical and equitable connections with the other.

Research on difficult knowledge also has important implications for education policymaking, as education policy is an excellent site to examine the affective alignment of policy text with the politics it conveys (Lähdesmäki, Koistinen, and Ylönen 2020; Zembylas 2020). In other words, the study of how education policy is entangled with difficult knowledge provides a window to identify how particular political views and constructs (e.g., reconciliation, justice, democracy, gender equality) are mobilised in/through education policy. Hence, examining the affective meanings with which certain concepts are invested in the context of particular social and political conditions, educators and researchers can better understand the influences and possibilities under which education policy operates to invoke, sustain or repair the traumas, losses and sufferings of post-truth era. We would argue, then, that future research on difficult knowledge can also include investigations of education policies and policymaking as manifestations of particular moral and political ideologies. Such research will help educators and policymakers alike to identify how certain moral and political visions and ideals function as modes of governance that inevitably reproduce or break particular difficult knowledges.

There is also a need for further research, which investigates the ways in which theory can be mobilised to inform teaching practices and the ways in which theory might be used to inform the design of learning activities that are responsive to the age and cultural contexts of the learners. Following the work presented in this special issue, we find a strong imperative towards the use of relational, embodied and collective inquiry through which to provide for rich and enabling forms of learning, both for educators who called on to represent difficult knowledge and for learners who are presented with such knowledge. This is where we see the need for further cross-disciplinary learning in education. For teachers and educators in particular, we see an imperative to investigate the types of professional learning and modes of pedagogy that can contribute to willingness, readiness and capacities to take up the challenge of engaging with and re-representing difficult knowledge. As some of the contributions in this special issue have also demonstrated, it is important for research to investigate the response of learners to such initiatives, so we can learn directly from them about what works in fostering their insight, compassion and a commitment to proactive responses.