Teaching through tension: Engaging refugee background students’ difficult knowledge through critical improvisations

• In Event: Responses to Pedagogical Impediments in Unforgetting History

Abstract

This study explores how educators navigate unplanned, ethically charged moments when refugee-background students’ lived experiences—shaped by war, displacement, and trauma—surface in the classroom. Drawing on interviews with 16 Ontario-based teachers and grounded in Critical Refugee Studies (Espiritu, 2014) and Becker's (2014) funds of (difficult) knowledge, the study introduces critical improvisations as a pedagogical approach that is responsive, relational, and emotionally attuned. Rather than resolving discomfort or eliciting tidy narratives of resilience, teachers held space for silence, refusal, and complexity. These improvisations illuminate how educators can work within and against institutional constraints to affirm refugee students’ knowledge. The findings reframe inclusion as a question of epistemic justice and call for sustained support for humanizing, trauma-informed teaching.

Authors

• Thursica Kovinthan Levi, Toronto Metropolitan University

• Laxana Paskaran, York University