Are Our Difficult Histories Difficult?

• In Event: Critical Perspectives on Teaching Difficult History

Abstract

This article outlines the way contents, agents and context construe historical topics as difficult histories. Content can be interpreted as difficult from a psychoanalytic perspective on trauma (Baum et al., 2000) or from a social psychological intergroup comparison perspective (Abrams & Hogg, 1990). Agents include policy makers sanctioning and legitimizing topics, teachers mediating the difficult histories, and students experiencing and reacting to them (Evans, Avery, & Pederson, 1999; Goldberg & Gerwin, 2013). Context, the unique past and current politics, may influence both which content is perceived as difficult as well as the ways it is dealt with.

This study of the Israeli context, centers on two types of difficult histories; the history of the Holocaust, perhaps the paradigmatic history of trauma and victimhood, and the History of the Palestinian Refugee problem, which for Jewish Israelis can be seen as a history of perpetrating harm onto others. Data was collected from a variety of sources, including teacher and student surveys, teaching interventions with students and curriculum policy documents.

Findings show that in the (Jewish) Israeli context it appears that teaching traumatic history of victimhood is not considered difficult, while encountering the in-group as perpetrator is construed as difficult and dangerous. Engagement with Holocaust history is reported to arouse almost universal enthusiasm both among teachers and among students, contrary to trauma perspective on difficult histories. Encounter with perspectives on Israel's role in the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem and engagement with Palestinian suffering aroused official sanctions, teacher evasion and student emotions and defensive reactions. However, there are also instances of teachers’ risk taking and appraisal of these issues as stimulators of discussion and motivators for learning, as well as student openness to the other’s voice.

I discuss the above phenomena as showing the stronger relevance of a social psychological perspective, compared to the psychoanalytical perspective, for interpreting agents' (teachers, learners and policy makers) engagement with difficult histories. On the one hand, it may explicate the empowering and motivating effect engagement with difficult histories of victimhood, within the framework of "working through" trauma (Gross, 2011) as well as in the context of "competitive victimhood" dynamics (Sullivan, Landau, Branscombe, & Rothschild, 2012). On the other hand, this perspective also has clear implications for teaching and for overcoming defensive reactions to engagement with perspectives on in-group historical wrongdoing (such as insights from the "needs-based reconciliation model" (Shnabel, Nadler, Ullrich, Dovidio, & Carmi D., 2009)). The potential of difficult histories for developing critical historical literacy, complex epistemological stances and improving intergroup relations will be discussed and assessed. I present further pedagogic and didactic considerations derived from the findings.

The significance of the study is both in elaborating the complementary and contradictory theoretical perspectives on what constitutes a difficult history, and in outlining and advocating the applicability of each. Beyond the theoretical perspective, it gives a nuanced and contextualized outlook on incorporating such issues into actual teaching, in a way which should inform progressive curriculum policy makers.

Author

• Tsafrir Goldberg, University of Haifa