This paper presents the results of a three-year study of the impacts of teaching about the experiences of trauma on students studying to become teachers. The project's overarching objective is to develop an effective trauma-informed pedagogy that can support students who learn about the experiences of the 'Stolen Generations', the Holocaust, wars,…

Over the past decade, scholars from a variety of epistemological and theoretical backgrounds have begun to engage more deeply with history as a form of difficult knowledge. It is difficult to comprehend and can be traumatic for different groups for different reasons. History as a school subject has largely been used as a tool of hegemony by…

The purpose of this article is to analyze elementary school teachers' perceptions and affective experiences of an in-service training on death education taught by the first author over three years at the Cyprus Pedagogical Institute. The teacher training focused on how to teach about issues of death, loss, and grief at the elementary school. The…

In this paper, we analyse the Second World War (WW2) and the Holocaust as genocide during WW2 as sensitive topics in history teaching as perceived by 719 teachers from Austria, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Serbia and the Netherlands. Using the thematic content analysis of open answers to an online questionnaire we…

The experience of learning about emotive topics in the classroom remains relatively under-researched. Within the social sciences, death studies is undergoing a resurgence yet little is known about the student experience of exploring such issues in an academic setting. This research focuses on final year undergraduate students at a British…

The recent passing of legislation decriminalizing medically assisted suicide was a landmark in Canadian history. Since the law's passage, an average of four Canadians per day have chosen to die using medical assistance. With Canadians embracing this option of death, we argue that there will be moments in Canadian schools when this topic will be…

This article discusses the relation between emotions and testimony, by asking the questions: What do emotions do? Are emotions possible and desirable starting points for teaching difficult and complex subjects such as injustice and historical wounds? This article explores the 2015 image and testimony of Alan Kurdi, lying on a beach of the…

This study deals with the meaning that musicians and non-musicians attach to two contemporary railway noise compositions as conveyed through verbal and audio-graphic responses. The purpose of this mixed-method study was twofold: (1) to examine similarities and differences between musicians and non-musicians in their responses to contemporary…

Scholarship in English Education has suggested that English teachers can invite experiences of death and loss into English classrooms as part of curricular engagement because students' identities and experiences should be witnessed in classrooms (e.g., Dutro, 2019). Scholarship on literature response and instruction has emphasized that readers…

In today's society, where the Promethean project of mastering the universe seems to guide the scientific community to its last moment of triumph--human immortality--young people seem to lack curricular opportunities to engage with mortality. This is not surprising, as the legacy of psychology, as far back as the times of Freud and Jung, exposes a…

This exploratory case study examined how two teachers used a comparative approach to teach genocide histories in a Holocaust Literature elective course. Through interviews and observations, we studied how the teachers guided students in comparing genocides as well as how they used survivor testimonies in their instruction. We found that teachers…

Based on an ethnographic field study in Cologne, this article discusses the connection between memory practices and emotion ideologies in Holocaust education, using Sara Ahmed's concept of affective economies. Moral goals, political demands, and educators' care for their students lead to tensions in the education process. Two case studies…

From 2012 to 2016, American news headlines were dominated at various times by the killing of black men either stopped by police or presumed to be engaging in suspicious activity, and protests that spread through the Internet social media hashtag #blacklivesmatter. In this piece, the author revisits his time in teaching at an historically black…

Background and Objectives: Graduates from undergraduate nursing programs report inadequate death education. Most death education is focused on end-of-life care and taught by lecture. Students are not provided opportunities to reflect on their own feelings about death. Due to lack of clinical nursing faculty and shortage of clinical sites, students…

This article describes an online project in the foreign-language classroom in which Argentinian and British university students communicated across the globe to address a topic of human rights violations. The aim of the article is to answer the question of whether there is a place in language education for forgiveness and discomforting pedagogies.…