Increasingly in education we require our teachers and educators to implement culturally responsive learning experiences for a range of culturally and ethnically diverse students. For many this involves engaging with “difficult knowledge”. This paper argues that for educators to engage productively in culturally responsive pedagogies an engagement with difficult knowledge, through acknowledgement of the history and contemporary racial and ethnic practices, both implicit and explicit, needs to be addressed. Britzman (2013) talks about “difficult knowledge” in relation to disrupting ignorance of racial and ethnic stereotyping and bias. The concept of being “privileged” is difficult for many whites to comprehend, claiming ignorance and resistance. Garrett and Segall (2013) critique the belief that ignorance is simply a “lack of knowledge” (p. 295) and resistance an active not doing what is asked of (297). They redefine ignorance as a strategy of avoidance, which they link to psychoanalytic theories of “unconscious knowing” and “difficult knowledge” (Britzman 2013). Garrett and Segall argue that whites have raced ways of knowing through living in a raced society and further, this knowledge is uninterrogated white racial knowledge. Ignorance, redefined as a dynamic of knowledge, is a matter of choice, it is an active ‘forgetting’, a refusal of information and a desire not to know (Fitzpatrick 2018; Bell & Ream, 2021). For culturally responsive pedagogies to engage with an aim for social justice through decoloniality, strategies of ignorance employed to avoid acknowledging the privileges inherited through colonial histories need to be disrupted. Although difficult, these fraught colonial histories and positionalities of privilege need to be remembered and critically interrogated, and ways for educators and students to engage productively in difficult conversations need to be explored and realised.

To articulate the phenomenon of white educator paralysis (Leonardo, 2015) this paper draws on the complexity of difficult knowledge (Pitt & Britzman, 2015).  Critically engaging with and interrogating theories and pedagogies of positionality, Postcoloniality, ‘working-the-hypen’ and decoloniality, it reimagines the place of critical reflexivity in teacher training and educators practice. Critical reflexivity requires a move to contextualise positionality in an experience, and recognise the interplay between power, privilege and bias within our own lives and practices (Fitzpatrick 2018). Decolonisation work is both difficult and contested (Fūnez-Flores, Beltrán and Jupp 2022). Significant to the role of an educator is recognition that white racial groups often have difficult histories and critically interrogating these histories works as a form of decolonisation through making colonial structures visible, in being truthful, in unsettling the dominant narratives, resisting hegemonic discourses, and providing context to difficult conversations to address material change (Fitzpatrick, 2018).  Coming to know the past, the telling of alternative histories and alternative knowledges are all part of the critical pedagogy of decolonisation (Smith 1999). The possibility also of indigenising education, where Hoskins and Jones (2022) argue, indigenous ways of being and knowing are normalised, “offer[ing] a better, more just, society” (3). This paper argues practices such as culturally responsive pedagogy require a critically reflexive approach to ensure a perpetuation of binary categories don’t persist, and instead the possibility of new and emerging identities are able to flourish. Critically reflexive practices drawn on, to imagine differently and further the work of culturally responsive pedagogies are the methodologies of Critical Autoethnography and Critical Family History.

To engage in the discussion on difficult knowledge I will draw on critically reflexive projects: Critical Autoethnography and Critical Family History (Fitzpatrick, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023). The context will be white settler identity in Aotearoa New Zealand. Critical autoethnography (CAE), a qualitative methodology, focuses on the lived experiences of an individual, or individuals, inquiring into relevant issues they encounter, such as in their community of practice. The individual’s story is central and is juxtaposed alongside other stories from the wider community, and critical factors that influence these experiences. CAE appreciates the complexity of lived experiences, the different knowledges, cultures, and values that exist in our communities, and the embodied and felt repercussions of an experience (Adams et al., 2014). It recognises lived experiences are messy, entangled with others, have history, are haunted, are subject to time and place, and are influenced by external events. CAE requires the researcher to engage with theory through a critical framework of analysis (Holman Jones, 2015). Likewise, Critical Family History (CFH) involves the process of layering the personal story alongside the wider historical and social story, and alongside stories of other peoples who are entangled in our becoming (Sleeter 2016). Cognisant of Smith’s influential work on decolonising methodologies, CFH illuminates the power dynamics embedded in family histories and requires the researcher to speak with the ghosts (Derrida,1994). CAE and CFH focus the researcher on the critical, to orient them towards doing research that can potentially transform and bring justice. The researcher writes small personal stories with theory/theorists relevant to the context who, St. Pierre (2014) contended, are in “sympathy” with our writing. This ongoing conversation between writing and theory is a cyclic process of generating data while simultaneously reading literature and thinking with theory. Holman Jones (2015) argued “the insights of theory … only become useful to us when they are presented in context, in practice, and performance, in people’s lives” (p. 5). They demand that the researcher think otherwise. The generation of stories, is ongoing and dances between generating and analysing data, through deliberate writing and crafting of stories with theory (Holman Jones, 2015). The researcher is required to develop a robust understanding of theories they draw on to engage in deep analytical work through the writing of the narratives, attending to the craft of writing as a method of inquiry (Fitzpatrick & Mullen, 2019). The act of doing, although difficult, is also rewarding.

CAE has relevance to the communities we engage in. It interrogates issues that are intrinsically embedded in the professions and lives of the people we work with. It works with data gleaned from our own experiences. It enables us to engage with hard, complicated, and sometimes painful experiences, and contribute to difficult conversations. It values the knowledge we bring and values the knowledge and experience of the communities we work in. As researcher, teacher, social worker, therapist, counsellor, or with other professional identity labels we might hold, we come to know ourselves and the worlds we work in differently. CFH provides an opportunity for white ‘settler’, and others, to explore and understand our histories in a richer and more human way. Furthermore, it provides us with the potential to understand the complexity of an identity forged out of a relationship with Other. Both CAE and CFH provide a way to engage with difficult knowledge, to speak with the ghosts that haunt a colonial past, to recognise positionality and interrogate privilege, to become part of the conversation to move toward transformation and justice, rather than becoming paralysed. It is a research which provokes, not represents, knowledge (Pitt & Briztman, 2015, p. 769). It is research that works to engage with the complexity of difficult knowledge. However a few thoughts I am still mulling over. How do we ensure the student/researcher is able to do this work safely, this is a vulnerable space to work in. How do we ensure they have the skills to think, to read theory and critically write as a method of inquiry? To deliberatively plug into theory, into writing, to create a “living bod[y] of thought (Holman Jones, 2016, p. 8). How do we ensure they are ethical in their telling and writing of stories.

Adams, T. E., Holman-Jones, S., & Ellis, C. (2014). Autoethnography: Understanding qualitative research. Oxford University Press. Bell A. & Ream, R. (2021). “Troubling Pākehā relations to place,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 10.1 (2021): 97-116. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2021.10.1.97 Britzman, D. P. (2013). Between psychoanalysis and pedagogy: Scenes of rapprochement. Curriculum Inquiry, 43.1 (2013): 95-117. Derrida, J. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 1994. Fitzpatrick, E., & Mullen, M. (2019). Writing innovative narratives to capture the complexity of lived experience: Poetry, scriptwriting and prose. In S. Farquhar & E. Fitzpatrick (Eds.), Innovations in narrative and metaphor: Methodologies and practices (pp. 73–93). Springer Nature. Fitzpatrick, E. (2018). Hauntology and Pākehā: Disrupting the Notion of Homogeneity. In Mana Tangatarua: Mixed heritages, Ethnic Identity and Biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Eds. Zarine L. Rocha and Melinda Webber, Routledge, 2018, pp. 193-213. Fitzpatrick, E. (2021). A Year of Encounters with Privilege. Handbook of Autoethnography, 2nd ed., edited by Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman-Jones and Carolyn Ellis, Routledge, 2021. Fitzpatrick, E. (2023). Crafting Criticality Into My Wayfaring Jewish Ancestors’ Colonial Trade Connections. In Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art, Craft & Visual Culture Education, Ed. Manisha Sharma and Amanda Alexandra. Routledge. Fúnez-Flores, , I, Díaz Beltrán, I & Jupp, J. (2022). Decolonial Discourses and Practices: Geopolitical Contexts, Intellectual Genealogies, and Situated Pedagogies, Educational Studies, 596-619. DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2022.2132393 Garrett, H. J., & Segall, A. (2013). (Re)considerations of ignorance and resistance in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(4), 294-304. Holman Jones, S. (2015). Living bodies of thought: The “critical” in critical autoethnography. Qualitative Inquiry. https://doi.org/ 10.177/1077800415622509 Hoskins, TK &Jones, A. (2022). Indigenous inclusion and Indigenising the University. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies. 57, (2022): 305-320. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40841-022-00264-1 Leonardo, Z. (2015). Contracting race: writing, racism, and education. Critical Studies in Education, 56(1), 86-98. doi:10.1080/17508487.2015.981197 Pitt, A. & Britzman, D. (2015). Speculations on qualitities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning: an experiment in psychoanalytic research, Qualitative Studies in Education. 16 (6), 755-776. DOU: 10.1080/09518390310001632135. Sleeter, C. (2020). Critical Family History: An Introduction. Genealogy, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 1-6. doi:10.3390/genealogy4020064 Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books. St. Pierre, E. (2014). An always already absent collaboration. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 14(4), 374–379. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708614530309