Book Review: Teaching and Learning Difficult Histories in International Contexts: A Critical Sociocultural Approach

Many topics covered in history courses today deal with issues often deemed as painful and traumatic, or what Britzman (1998) calls “difficult knowledge”. Engaging with topics such as slavery, racism, the Holocaust, genocide, Indigenous histories, colonialism, and LGBTQ issues to name a just a few, educators are continuously tasked with teaching these difficult histories to students who may be personally affected, resistant, or apathetic towards them. Consequently, within history education there has been an increased interest in better understanding how educators can engage students with these subjects in ways that are both personally meaningful and historically accurate. Terrie Epstein and Carla L. Peck's edited volume Teaching and Learning Difficult Histories in International Contexts (2018) provides a comprehensive and important contribution to this growing body of literature as it addresses many of the issues teachers and students face when confronting difficult histories both in and outside of the classroom.

Originally stemming from an AERA sponsored conference, the book is organized around four sections that each deal with a particular component of difficult history. Defining difficult histories as “historical narratives and other forms (learning standards, curriculum frameworks) that incorporate contested, painful and/or violent events into regional, national, or global accounts of the past” (p.1), the authors introduce “a critical sociocultural approach” to history education which combines disciplinary, sociocultural, and critical theoretical frameworks to provide a broader, comprehensive understanding and analysis of history.

Section 1 is focused on how post-conflict societies struggle to represent histories that are often not agreed upon. Sirkka Ahonen's comparative study of Finland after the war of 1918, Bosnia-Herzegovina after 1992–1995, and post-apartheid South Africa provides the reader with a brief but useful understanding of the various ways in which these post-conflict societies attempted to deal with their difficult pasts. Critical of Finland's silencing of “the other” and Bosnia-Herzegovina's continuous contested representations of the past, Ahonen contends that South Africa's method of opening dialogue between competing parties is a necessary way to utilize history education in post conflict societies. Moreover, Ahonen calls for a more critical perspective of events that acknowledges identity narratives but is not entirely driven by them.

In Chapter 2, Maria Grever examines how popular uses of difficult heritage related to World War II and the Holocaust intersect with historical thinking skills in the Netherlands. She illuminates the fact that many students come to learn about history not necessarily in a formal setting such as a classroom, but at historic sites, in movies, and through playing video games. The main premise from which Grever seems to draw, and indeed a theme found throughout the book is how the inherent connection between the past and present can be utilized within history education. With this understanding, Grever effectively reveals how both history education and pop culture can inform one another through a brief analysis of two Dutch War exhibitions dedicated to World War II.

Acknowledging the immense difficulties nations face when engaging with their own heritage, as well as the somewhat problematic use of the term (Lowenthal, 1998), Grever maintains that these spaces of “authentic” learning do create experiences where people can “feel” the past (p.35). Consequently, she suggests history educators need to find ways to connect formal and informal learning practices while maintaining criticality and historical distance (Phillips, 2004; Wineburg, 2001). Ultimately, Grever concludes that the “Resistance Museum Junior” in the Children's Museum in Amsterdam and the “Child at War” at the Museon in the Hague both demonstrate that strategically developed heritage sites can foster historical understanding about World War II and the Holocaust (p.42). Although it might be useful for Grever to have also included an example of a museum that does not effectively balance “closeness and distance”, her call for future research into the multifaceted ways in which heritage and historical thinking skills is a necessary condition for future projects in history education.

In keeping with the theme of history's connection to the present, Loh Kah Seng's analysis of how the Operation Coldstore Controversy in Singapore remains a source of contention among policy makers, researchers, and teachers provides an eye-opening perspective the challenges involved in addressing difficult histories in an authoritarian society. Chapter 3 begins with a brief introduction to the historical context of the 1963 Operation Coldstore in Singapore before discussing the debate that exists around the notion of whether the crackdown was done for security reasons or for political gain. Throughout his analysis, Loh focuses on how the controversy is represented and perceived in the public sphere, as well as the possibilities and limitations of teaching the controversy in public schools. Drawing from Paulo Freire's (1970) emphasis on counter-narratives and Jorn Rusen's (1989) focus on the connection between history and life practices, Loh concludes that there is “a dialogic connection” (p.47) that exists between public history and what takes place in history classrooms throughout Singapore.

After a brief discussion of the multifaceted ways in which Operation Coldstore has been represented and discussed in public history since the 1960s, Loh seemingly praises what he terms the “trinity of alternate historians” (p.50) who bravely provided counter-narratives to the traditional, celebratory, nationalistic account Operation Coldstore. As one of the actual members of the this group of historians, the author outwardly criticizes Singapore's Ministry of Education and official history textbooks for promulgating the idea of “imagined vulnerability” in order to prop up an authoritative government. Turning his focus to the work of teachers, Loh acknowledges that there is fear and anxiety associated with teaching the controversy, but maintains that it is useful in that it can potentially help students and teachers engage with difference and controversy in the classroom.

The last chapter in this section pivots back to South Africa as Wassermann analyzes the debate that exits surrounding apartheid within the school history curriculum. Although working with similar themes, such as history's connection to the present and one-sided narratives, Wasserman's analysis predominantly focuses on the intersection between history and identity, and how these come to influence educational policy. Correctly identifying apartheid as the core topic of difficult knowledge within South African history, Wassermann provides a brief but comprehensive overview of how apartheid has been treated within public education throughout South Africa since 1948. From colonial educational practices where the seeds of apartheid “permeated school history” and were influenced by white nationalists (p.59–60) to the shift in the 1990s towards reconciliation in which Wasserman contends led to a “collective amnesia” (p.62), to the more recent push in 2014 from the South African Democratic Teachers Union to re-center history at the forefront of social studies education, Wasserman brilliantly weaves together the competing forces at root of the debate over how apartheid should be dealt with in history classes. Her analysis reveals that the clear generation gap over the significance placed on the teaching of apartheid as central to the curriculum persists today.

The Chapters in Section 2 shift from examining post-conflict historical memories towards examining the specific aspects of teaching and learning Indigenous histories. The section begins with Clark's significant study examining how educators can challenge the hegemonic narratives of Australia's national origins while simultaneously keeping students engaged with the content. Asking important questions that challenge the origin myths of Australia and disrupt hegemonic national narratives, Clark begins his analysis with a brief but important overview of the “history wars” that revolve around how colonial history should be represented in spaces of public history. Noting these debates often leave out the voices of students and teachers, Clark makes this a central component of his research.

After conducting a large-scale study asking students and teachers their opinions about learning and/or teaching indigenous histories, Clark reveals that although Indigenous history is clearly included in the curriculum, most teachers either don't feel qualified or comfortable enough with teaching it, or worse, teach it the same way year in and year out, thus leading to no structured spiraling of content over the years. Not surprisingly, as Clark maintains, students find the topic boring because they have likely engaged with it in unimaginative ways throughout both earlier and secondary grades. Although there are many difficulties to overcome for Indigenous histories to be treated in a way that is exciting and useful for students, Clark reminds us there is still a genuine interest among teachers and students to engage with this difficult history.

In Chapter 6 Kidman examines the multifaceted ways in which the conflicts surrounding the indigenous history of New Zealand are debated in museums. With an increased understanding among museums that history is not always celebratory, many exhibitions struggle with how to represent the difficult histories of “colonial invasions, intergenerational violence, and acts of genocide against indigenous populations” (p.98). Similar to Clark's focus on national origins, Kidman examines the contested meanings and feelings surrounding the Treaty of Waitangi: Signs of a Nation exhibit in the Museum of New Zealand. Sitting across from the exhibit is a carved war canoe of the Maori; a Maori waka taua, which Kidman uses as a jumping off point to highlight the controversies surrounding the allegedly “founding” treaty of New Zealand. Here, another theme of the book is introduced, when Kidman discusses the important overlays and intersections between history, nationhood, and citizenship. As Anderson (2006) reminds us, memories and narratives of the past are integral to how people come to view their nationalities. Consequently, how these memories and narratives are discussed, represented, and treated in spaces of education such as museums is crucial to New Zealander's conceptualization of citizenship.

Rather than memory, Kidman focuses on the “forgetting” entangled with the Treaty of Waitangi. Somewhat critical of the “lovely bicultural knowledge” of an imagined community between Indigenous and settler histories, Kidman contends that the exhibit essentially is centered on an “ideal bicultural citizenship and the uncomfortable intrusions of the past are largely ignored or smoothed away” (p. 105). Although the treaty exhibition is meant to demonstrate a symbol of unity within the nation, Kidman's analysis reveals that it is still a source of division within New Zealand.

Chapter 7 introduces a different analysis of the Maori in New Zealand, as Sheehan, Epstein, and Harcourt delve into the ways in which the Treaty of Waitangi is interpreted and understood by students who identify as either Indigenous or non-Indigenous. Here again, the authors are driven by two of the larger themes of the book; the intersection between history and identity, and the relationship between the past and present. With focus on the concept of significance, the authors conducted a large-scale study where students from four different ethnic groups were asked to give significance to particular aspects of New Zealand's Indigenous history. Not surprisingly, the authors found that the adolescents who identified themselves as Maori understood the treaty as more problematic than those who did not. Perhaps more significantly, these same students also expressed that the treaty was of great personal significance to them, thus sealing its implications as an important factor in the history curriculum. Shifting back to the critical sociocultural approach the authors outlined in the beginning of the book, Sheehan et al. use these findings to remind history educators and teachers that applying the disciplinary approach in classrooms is not enough; one must find ways to consider and engage the social identities of students as well. Similar to the work of Wertsch (2002) who argued that students identities are inherently linked to historical narratives, the authors contend that by paying attention to the ways in which the Treaty of Waitangi is understood by different groups of students, teachers can become more culturally responsive in their classrooms.

Much of the aforementioned work with Indigenous histories is situated within a decolonizing framework which Tinkham takes up in Chapter 8. Influenced by a comment from one of her own students, the researcher set out to examine how students’ social studies courses connected with what they learned at home and in their communities. Rather than speak for the students themselves, Tinkham applies a decolonizing approach wherein the participants play an active role in interpreting the data. Comparing Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students’ perceptions of how Indigenous histories were treated in classrooms, Tinkham, provides a revealing portrait of the differences among schools in Nova Scotia in their engagement with difficult histories. The author contends that for these histories to be considered serious components of the history curriculum “western and indigenous knowledge should be presented and received in complimentary ways” (p.134). Moreover, due to the racism that Ni'newey and Mi'Kmaw students reported experiencing within their schools, Kinkman argues that teachers, administrators, and all other personnel working within schools need to address these transgressions.

With more of a practitioner view point, Section 3 provides useful suggestions for teachers who want to engage these histories in ways that won't alienate students or lead to resistance. The section begins with Goldberg's analysis of how teaching and learning are ultimately affected by the teachers’ motivation to engage with difficult histories. After providing yet another brief overview of how difficult history is conceptualized, the author focuses on the two main difficult histories that play out in an Israeli context; the Holocaust and the Palestinian Refugee situation. Whereas Arab students seemed to express empathy towards Jews after learning about the Holocaust, the same effect did not hold true when Jewish students learned about the Palestinian refugee problem. Goldberg suggests that this may be because the Palestinian refugee problem is directly linked with the “Jewish Israeli existence story” and it has been silenced in the curriculum (p.150). Nevertheless, stories and perspectives of Palestinians have gradually creeped into the curriculum, forcing both students and teachers to face this difficult past. In order to do so, Goldberg argues that it is essential for Jews and Arabs to acknowledge the other's perspective and suffering, albeit this is the most difficult aspect of these difficult histories. Teachers can help, Goldberg suggests, by fostering “a setting of care and an affirmative approach to narratives and emotions” that promote “critical disciplinary practices (p. 156).

Building on the theme of citizenship, McCully challenging traditional boundaries of what constitutes history and advocates for a multi-perspective, disciplinary approach to history education. He contends that “… those who are hoping to bring about change need to be clear on where they stand on the intrinsic/extrinsic continuum” (p.162). This brings up an important consideration for both history teachers and teacher educators; should the purpose of teaching difficult histories always be to push students towards moral action, and if so, should that be clearly evident?

In this exploratory study, McCully applies Barton and McCully's (2005, 2010, 2012) principles of teaching history in contested societies to examine four case studies in Northern Ireland. With a focus on the 8th principle, McCully found that certain programs such as the Facing History course were successful in connecting history to citizenship and the present. Reflective of the larger debate in history education between disciplinary approaches or connections to the present, McCully finds that although there are benefits to those programs that are explicit in their purpose, there is a danger in that those that are too focused on the present will result in not being history at all. Similar to most of the authors in the book, he concludes that history education does indeed play a role in social change, yet the question still remains for educators of whether or not that should be the main goal.

Looping back to contested Indigenous histories, Stoskopf and Bermudez examine teachers’ understandings of the complexity involved in teaching about the Trail of Tears in Chapter 11. Analyzing both textbook narratives and teacher accounts of the Trail of Tears, the two-phased research project that the authors conducted revealed important findings for both teacher and history education professors. “Despite its catastrophic effects, textbook narratives tended to avoid, sanitize or minimize the scope, magnitude and meaning of the violence intrinsic to this episode of U.S. History (p.177). In essence, the textbooks the authors examined tended to minimize and marginalize the intricate complexities of the violence involved in the Trail of Tears. Moreover, teachers who took up the subject tended to focus more on Jackson, minimizing the perspective of the natives. Teachers lack of engaging fully with all aspects of the Trail of Tears seemingly stemmed from their lack of time and/or resources. Nevertheless, Stoskopf and Bermudez's point out the inherent need among teachers and teacher educators to fully engage in all aspects of history education, including emotional and moral, to provide a deeper meaning for students.

With a similar focus on the ways in which teachers engage (or don't engage) with difficult histories in the classroom, Zembylas focuses on those teachers who resist these histories in Chapter 12. With a specific emphasis on affect, Zembylas uses Britzman's (1998) conceptualization of difficult knowledge to examine how two elements of resistance; action and opposition, intersect with affective dimensions of difficult histories to disrupt teachers and learners perceptions. This pedagogy of discomfort (Boler & Zembylas, 2003) is necessary, Zembylas argues, to challenge “cherished beliefs and normative practices that sustain reified frames on difficult history” (p. 197). Essentially, he argues that an “affective disruption” is necessary if we want to “keep the doors open for transformative learning opportunities” (p.200).

Perhaps one of the most interesting chapters in the book is Mayo's work discussing the historical roots of the physical and symbolic violence that has been and is continually imposed on the LGBT community. After providing a brief discussion of the history directed towards LGBT communities, Mayo draws the reader's attention to two significant historical moments; the persecution of the Two Spirit Indigenous People and the murder of Matthew Sheppard. Maintaining that these two developments exemplify Britzman's (1998) conceptualization of difficult knowledge, Mayo focuses on how students who identify as LGBT are affected by encountering these difficult histories in the classroom.

Mayo suggests that focusing on Two Spirit People could lead to a more complex understanding of social studies. By providing a historically rooted understanding of gendered bodies, teacher can better “complicate the gender element” (p.212). Shifting to the murder of Matthew Sheppard, the author discusses his own experiences learning about this event in high school as a jumping off point to criticize the celebratory and triumphant nature in which LGBT history is usually treated in the classroom.

In Chapter 14, Maria Auxiliadora Schmidt draws on the work of von Borries (2011) in her argument that history education in Brazil needs to be relevant to students’ lives for them to glean meaning from them. Connecting emotions with historical knowledge, Schmidt makes a convincing case that the emotional entanglements involved in engaging in difficult histories cannot be separated from the cognitive work of historical consciousness. Here again, the theme of history's connection to the present is brought forth as Schmidt outlines three difficult histories in Brazil; the genocide of indigenous people, the slavery system, and the Paraguayan war. Although Schmidt points out that there is little discussion in Brazil over how these topics are treated in the classroom, it is possible to connect these histories to students lives by highlighting the roles of ordinary people and how they were able to affect change in the past.

In the final chapter of the book, Peck brings us back to the intersection between history and identity in her analysis of the controversy surrounding the reenactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in British Columbia. Here again, we see Seixas’ (1997) notion that historical significance is footed in its connection to the present, as students’ self-described ethnic identities greatly influenced their perceptions of the past. Although previous work has acknowledged and called for this focus on student identities (Levstik, 1999), Peck's is unique in that she asks students to describe their own ethnic identities. Moreover, Peck's work is significant in that, not only does it corroborate what much of the previous literature connecting students’ identities and historical thinking has found, but is also highlight the role of metacognition, suggesting that students’ abilities to consider their own thinking contributes greatly to their understanding the past. In essence, Peck concluded that students understood that those events which were deemed historically significant could change depending on one's ethnic identity, thus providing teachers with a potentially powerful avenue of inquiry to expand upon students historical thinking and learning.

As research on difficult histories continues to become a significant factor within history education, Epstein and Peck's edited volume is an important addition to the literature. The wide-array of topics covered provide important insights for anyone interested in the intersections between historical thinking, historical consciousness, heritage, and identity. Scholarly engaging, yet wholly accessible, Teaching and Learning Difficult Histories could be used in social studies methods courses to introduce students to a comprehensive overview of the many challenges inherent to teaching difficult histories. The book would also serve well for graduate instructors who seek to engage their students with critical social approaches to meaning-making in social studies. Finally, classroom practitioners, particularly those who teach courses on genocide and/or human rights, could utilize the book to gain deeper background knowledge of the many controversies and conflicts that permeate much of history.