We Want to Be Sad: Children’s Calls for Honest Learning in Restrictive Times

• In Event: Amplifying Children's Voices for Transformative Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Schools have become battlegrounds over whose histories are taught, yet children’s emotional responses to injustice remain understudied. Drawing on a two-year (2022–2024) international Teacher Inquiry Group (TIG), this paper analyzes three narrative vignettes from novice and veteran teachers to explore: What can teachers and teacher educators learn about teaching for social justice by attending to how children feel? Findings show that children resist performative positivity and curricular whitewashing, treating discomfort as essential to ethical growth. Small acts—pausing to discuss feelings, leaving justice-oriented books visible—opened counter-narratives that challenge authoritarian erasures of injustice. Reframing discomfort as generative positions teacher resistance as a response to students’ rights to honest education, offering a subtle yet powerful form of collective resistance in restrictive educational climates.

Author

• Kushya Sugarman, Mount Holyoke College