It is easy as a retired educator to bull my neck and growl at the social/cultural/political powers that demand schools teach their self-interested and slanted content and opinions. I no longer have skin in the game or employment to protect. I also have the advantage of location; Wisconsin is not Florida or Texas, thankfully, where legislators mandate curriculum, ban books, and threaten teachers who would teach differently. Yet the fumes of bias drift all over our nation and cause educators to blink. Can we teach uncomfortable topics to children today? The answer is we must if we are to cause children to achieve deeper learning and understanding of their world. Teaching anything in the realm of the uncomfortable is always couched within the guardrails of teacher professionalism for knowing what, when, and to what degree to teach any curriculum. Our integrity as teachers requires us to teach the uncomfortable.
Why is this critical to educators today?
First, school governance has become the new focal interest for activism. Partisan and ultra-partisan activism is embedded in our Congress and statehouses. Bills reflecting the activist agenda are queued up for partisan majority approval. Like an army of ants looking for new grass, activism in many areas of our nation is moving into school board meetings with demands of what and what not to teach. They are proving a democratic truth that school boards are the real grass roots of politics and community action and approval. School board meetings and their agendas are public and accessible. A second truth is activism loves controversy.
Second, the pandemic created tension between school boards and parents and the local community. Disparate perspectives regarding school closure, masking, and vaccination requirements caused many communities to have animated and heated agreements and disagreements with their school board. It was a two-sided argument with information and emotion on both sides. Board rooms are used to contending with controversy.
Third, life in 2024 is confronted with facts and unfacts, truths and lies, and propaganda from all fronts. Educators at all levels face the challenge of teaching children how to discern truth from untruth, bias in every perspective, and how to arrive at informed and defendable understandings.
https://www.ascd.org/blogs/confronting-the-uncomfortable-strategies-to-teach-enslavement
To post hole on a current hot issue, the Israeli/Hamas war brings one, two, and three above to the forefront of teaching decisions. It is such a rich and problematic issue. Children need to learn about the Holocaust, Zionism, the creation of Israel from a Palestinian homeland, the many conflicts between Israel and Arab/Islamic nations, human rights regardless of nationality or faith, Constitutional rights to speech and protest, and how colleges, universities, and cities respond to protesting demonstrations. And the confusion of conflating religious beliefs with national/governmental actions. To repeat, this is a rich and problematic issue. It is a critical and teachable moment for teachers and children and for the profession of teaching.
Integrity
The Wisconsin Teacher Standards include “Professional Learning and Ethical Practice”. Specifically, “the teacher uses evidence to continuously evaluate the teacher’s practice, including the effects of the teacher’s choices and actions on pupils, their families, other educators, and the community”.
To teach with integrity today, educators need to consider how they will address this teachable moment against their understanding of the Ethical Practice standard. There are many professional decisions tobe made for each teachable moment.
An example of teaching the uncomfortable.
In 1992 we took all students in the Whitefish Bay High School (WI) to see the motion picture, Malcolm X. In 1993, we took all students to see Schindler’s List. As the high school principal, I worked with our parent support groups to understand how each movie was a teachable moment for children in our Milwaukee suburb with a significant Jewish population and a significant inclusion of non-resident Black students from Milwaukee in our student body. With parent support I worked with our faculty to gain approval and instructional designs for creating teachable moments outside our annual curriculum.
Each movie provided an opportunity for pre-teaching, movie attendance, and post-teaching. We provided parents with the option for their children to not see either movie and had meaningful, parallel curriculum for their study so they could participate in the pre- and post-instruction of what it meant to be Black in America in the context of Malcolm X and to understand the genocide of Nazi Germany against Europe’s Jewish population.
The decision to do this was compelling but not necessary in the teaching of our usual curriculum. It became compelling and necessary as we considered how to best teach our children about two issues, racism and ethnic/religious genocide, that pervade our national and world history. Our ethical responsibility supported a decision to teach the uncomfortable. I look back on our faculty and parents with great pride and with admiration for our superintendent and school board who supported our teaching the uncomfortable. We took our students to the opening week showing of each movie and caused an indelible learning episode in their school lives.
Carpe’ teaching the uncomfortable.
School boards provide their teachers with a vetted and approved annual curriculum. The decision to disrupt children’s learning of this standards-based instruction must be taken very seriously. Taking an entire school to the movies is a big leap. Teaching the uncomfortable is strategic. It is not everyday schooling. However, there is plenty of room within the approved standards of our social studies and ELA curriculum for inspecting the uncomfortable and contemporary issues of daily life and news. Any discussion of campus protests over the Israel/Hamas war opens children to background, historical instruction, analysis of religious and national entities, and policies that support national treaties and human welfare.
Any discussion of economics opens children to background and historical instruction on the equity of all Americans’ access to property, employment, and financial security in their American Dream.
Any discussion of local school policies regarding gender and student access to school facilities and team sports opens children to a discussion of diversity.
Any discussion of nation, state, and local community opens children to a discussion of migration, population trends, ethnic and cultural diversity, and a changing, multi-cultural America.
An ethical position to teach the uncomfortable is high ground.
Children need a solid education in grade level and course curriculum. Teaching the uncomfortable are strategic decisions designed to capture teachable moments. It is not everyday work. Some teachers are uncomfortable with the uncomfortable. For the educator who is comfortable, there is room for many educators on the high ground of teaching the uncomfortable. Grab it and teach!