Research questions

1. What do educators perceive to be controversial, dangerous or troublesome in work with children, young people or adult learners?

2. How do teachers in universities prepare themselves and their pre-service teacher education students for teaching controversial and troublesome knowledge?

3. What shapes the responses of educators faced with troublesome knowledge?

Theoretical framework

The paper is a report of the pilot phase of the project. This project draws on work by Haynes on listening (2005, 2007) and Haynes and Murris (2009) on teachers’ and students’ responses to controversial questions in the context of philosophical enquiry, and draws on Brown’s research on the relational nature of teaching and learning (Brown 2006, 2009).  Social and personal transformation and integration are significant concepts in these works.

Philosophically, the ‘difficulty’ of education is informed by Habermas’ concept of the capacity for communicative reason (1984). Dangerous knowledge is explored through Nussbaum’s thesis on the emotions as ‘upheavals of thought’ requiring judgements of value (2001). In the search for a pedagogy that integrates personal and social goals we turn to Nussbaum’s advocacy of ‘capabilities’ to be fostered in education: critical self examination, narrative imagination and the ideal of the world citizen (2006).

The work of Britzman (2003), Meyer and Land (2005), Bayne (2008) provide a theoretical framework for considering what makes knowledge psychologically difficult and how it can be represented and narrated.

This research project connects philosophical, pedagogical, psychoanalytic and methodological dilemmas. Pedagogical perspectives also demand a discussion of the ethical responsibilities of teachers and students. Psychoanalytic perspectives demand recognition of the role that unconscious phantasy and resistance play in the shaping of experience and its narration. Knowing in the present cannot be detached from the libidinal forces that have driven our learning since birth. The interplay of reality and phantasy in the formation of the ego limits the individual’s ability to speak authoritatively. The difficult knowledge located in the curriculum interacts with and interferes with the difficult knowledge of the psyche, threatening coherence of the psyche.

Methodologically, narratives of teaching and learning provide possibilities for interpretations of the dynamic tension between inner and outer worlds. This dynamic can connect current and past events, creating unanticipated disturbances that can transfer the dynamics of earlier experiences into the present in either revised or unreconstructed forms. Difficult knowledge can threaten professional identity as it is defined in terms of status, power and authority. It can also threaten self integrity through the unconsciously made connections between present demands to engage as learner or teacher and through unconscious associations that bring the past into the present, imbuing pedagogy with affect and transference relations.

The teacher’s and learner’s overt responses to difficult knowledge threaten to lay bare the self – the transformative force of knowledge at work in the classroom – and in addition the inner life of the self can be disrupted by the connection of past and current responses to experience. The purpose of the project is to explore how educators and students negotiate their pedagogical engagements with difficult knowledge.

Bayne, S. (2008) Uncanny spaces for higher education. ALT-J,16:3, 197 —205 Britzman, D. P. (2003) After-Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and psychoanalytic histories of learning. New York: SUNY Brown, T. (2006) Negotiating Psychological Disturbance in Pre-service Teacher Education, Teaching and Teacher Education Vol 22 No 6 657-689 Brown, T. (2009) Education and after-education - exploring learning as a relational process (in) Suanne Gibson and Joanna Haynes (Eds) Perspectives on Participation and Inclusion: Engaging Education London: Continuum Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by T.McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Haynes, J. (2005) ‘Secrets and Boundaries in Classroom Dialogues with Children: From Critical Episode to Social Enquiry’, Childhood and Philosophy, 1(2) July-December, 2005 www.filoeduc.org/childphilo Haynes, J. (2007) Listening as a Critical Practice: Learning though Philosophy with Children. PhD Thesis, University of Exeter Haynes, J. and Murris, K. (2009) ‘The Wrong Message: Risk, Censorship and the Struggle for Democracy in the Primary School’, Thinking, Journal of Philosophy for Children 18 (4) Meyer, J. and Land, R. (2005) Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (3): implications for course design and evaluation. (in) Rust, C. (ed) Improving Student Learning: Diversity and Inclusivity. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development Nussbaum, M. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2006) Education and Democratic Citizenship: Capabilities and Quality Education in Journal of Human Development (7)3: pp385-396. Splitter, L. and Sharp, A-M. (1995) Teaching for Better Thinking: The Classroom Community of Enquiry. Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research Thomson, P. (2008) (ed) Doing Visual Research with Children and Young People London: Routledge Tripp, D. (1998) ‘Critical Incidents in Action Inquiry’, in Shacklock, G. and Smyth, J. (eds.), Being Reflexive in Critical, Educational and Social Research. London: Falmer Press