Difficult-ish as an Antidote to Villainification and Its Partner, “Difficult Histories” (Poster 3)

• In Event: Teaching Villainification in Social Studies: Pedagogies to Deepen Understanding of Social Evils

Abstract

I examine how villainification and the term “difficult histories” work together to create harmful binaries within history education. Interestingly, thus far the social studies literature has typically discussed villainification and difficult histories as disparate topics, but I contend that they are interconnected as the former creates “single actors who lose their ordinary characteristics as they become the faces of systemic harm” (van Kessel & Crowley, 2017, p. 436) and the latter bounds those actors within distinctive “difficult” historical events. Some examples include: Hitler (villain) and the Holocaust (difficult history); Ku Klux Klan (villains) and Jim Crow (difficult history); Andrew Jackson (villain) and the forced removal of Indigenous groups (difficult history). In many ways, villainification and difficult histories cannot exist without each other as villains need historical events in which they can perform evil acts, and difficult histories need villains to do “evil” things as a rationale for the historical events to be “difficult.” Even more, because the two are so powerful together, I wonder what happens to the learning and teaching of histories when curricula or social studies educators position people into villain/hero binaries and events from the past into difficult/non-difficult binaries.

To be clear, my question does not dispel the fact that people have committed horrible acts or that violent events have occurred throughout history, rather my question forces me to interrogate how the production of binaries, where people are portrayed as villains and historical events are categorized as “difficult,” distorts the teaching and learning of history. Given the need to disrupt the binaries created by villainification and difficult histories, the purpose of this chapter is to illustrate how justice-oriented teachers can apply concepts of Difficult-ish (Jones, in press) to their lessons to disrupt history curricula that vilify historical actors, and how justice-oriented teacher educators can apply concepts of Difficult-ish in their classes to reframe how they prepare teachers to teach about “difficult” histories. Briefly, Difficult-ish is a framework that offers educators and teacher educators a new way to teach histories the field often deems difficult. Based on three concepts, Difficult-ish contends that 1) history should not be framed within binaries, 2) amplifies the lived experiences of historically marginalized groups, and 3) moves past (white) discomfort.

Author

• Brittany Jones, University at Buffalo - SUNY