Teaching Controversial Historical Issues

Silences in a climate of voicing: teachers’ perceptions of societal and self-silencing regarding sensitive historical issues

“…Apart from maintaining silences in history, teachers might also want to break silences. The current focus of history curricula in most Western countries on teaching historical inquiry and historical reasoning could be expected to stimulate critical engagement with the past and open discussion of sensitive historical issues (van Drie and van Boxtel 2008;Seixas and Morton 2013;Goldberg and Savenije 2018). There are two ways of understanding how sensitive historical issues are discussed in the history classroom, and silences are broken (Goldberg 2017).…”

“…This international movement of people has imported new controversies into the classroom. Historical topics that are not controversial in academia or the dominant majority's public realm could become controversial or sensitive in such classrooms because of the diversity of pupils and the narratives that they bring with them (Goldberg and Savenije 2018). In such diverse classroom settings, the presence of pupils of migrant backgrounds, who bring new voices and new sensitivities with them, can lead to the opposite outcomes of breaking silences, as well as the silencing of previously frequently discussed issues.…”

“…Diversity in the classroom increases the number of opinions and narratives among pupils or between the pupils and the teacher (Savenije, van Boxtel, and Grever 2014). This diversity could promote discussion of diverse perspectives and thus, in some cases, can break a silence (Goldberg and Savenije 2018). For example, Indonesian Muslim pupils might call for a more truthful and multi-perspective discussion of the war crimes perpetrated by the Dutch army in the Indonesian struggle for independence .…”

“…A safe and equal learning environment, in which power-free communication and the dominance of the better argument are the norms, is therefore a crucial factor in discussing sensitive issues in the history classroom (Habermas 1987;Virta 2009;Hess 2009;McCully 2006). Moreover, teachers require pedagogical and subject matter expertise to enable the discussions of historical topics from multiple perspectives in which teachers and pupils use contextualisation and source evaluation to ground their arguments in historical evidence (Goldberg and Savenije 2018;Wansink and Savenije 2018). These demands are challenging to meet for secondary history teachers and might discourage them from even trying.…”

Sensitivities in history teaching across Europe and Israel

“…Teaching about sensitive issues in history can thus not be isolated from the cultural and socio-political context and may pose different challenges to teachers in different societal contexts (Misco 2012;Goren and Yemini 2017;Goldberg and Savenije 2018;Kello 2016). In Western democracies teaching controversial issues is often seen as an integral part of citizenship education, social studies education, or history education.…”