Difficult Topics

Learning how to teach difficult topics seems to be a difficult topic in itself. Everyone always says to stay in the middle of the debate, but then sway in whichever direction is personally their favourite to back.

So what are difficult topics?

When I think about difficult topics, what comes to my mind are the divisible topics where we see more anger or hatred on any side of a conflict or topic. Politics, war, identity. These are things that are ingrained into the way people conceptualize themselves and the people around them. I understand that people come from many different walks of life, and no one experiences the world in the same way. Conversations around validity say that everyone's feelings and opinions are valid, and I have no desire to dispute that. What I think needs to be focused on is having compassion and understanding. 

Everyone knows how they feel, they have an understanding as to the reasons why they feel the way they do--to an extent. What they may not know is how another feels, and why another feels. 

Not every student is going to have a personal stake in whatever the topic is, but each topic is going to have a student who has a personal stake in it. 

The world and our society as it stands have resulted in everything becoming more political and being assigned a quick label that categorizes and alienates. At the end of it all, what people need to know how to do is work together and understand where the other is coming from. At the end of it all, we are all people, we love and learn and all have room to grow.

In one of my classrooms, a student once disclosed to me that they were being bullied and referred to as a 'terrorist' due to their ethnicity and religion. In this middle years classroom, I knew that they sometimes said words that they did not understand, and hurt each other unintentionally with these words. This classroom was a small community, full of students who had mostly known one another for years, they cared for one another, but on some days lacked understanding and compassion.

That evening, I took it upon myself to plan out a discussion that I would lead about oppression and discrimination. Using visuals and hand-drawn graphics, I had students brainstorm the different strains of identity and what identities people could have. Using their ideas, we talked as a class about the concept of intersectionality and drew the different lines to see how many ways people will experience the world based on who they are. After that, we looked at all of the strains of identity we had come up with and found some of the ways people are discriminated against for holding that identity as a part of who they are.

I summed up the lesson by telling the group a story. I had been with this class for 7 months already and had established a relationship with them. I am Chinese and have lived in Canada my whole life. During the pandemic, I faced some targeted violence and attacks and told them how I had felt seeing targeted violence in North America. They knew compassion, and they knew how to care. Understanding that everyone is a person like them, everyone has feelings like them, and everyone has a history like them, can go a long way to being able to teach these difficult topics.

At the base of it all, what is needed to teach any topic is respect, a relationship, and compassion. Teaching compassion can go alongside teaching some of the more divisive topics. So long as students know that not everyone experiences the world in the same way that they do, they can come to accept and understand the different perspectives that other people are coming from.

One of my professors told my class, "We need to teach compassion, we need to have a society of compassionate people and compassionate learners," and I have consistently reflected on that. At the base of compassion is respect and reflection. I think that reaching the level of respect required is the most difficult barrier to cross. People who feel as though they have been wronged are at times, less inclined to feel any respect to those who they feel are unworthy of it. The consistent dehumanization of different groups of people in media and common language is a linguistic barrier that I also find difficult to cross. I find that I wonder, how can I stay in the middle when I see people on both sides of a conflict suffering, all because we are so focused on what we think, and what we think we know, that we can't comprehend what someone else is feeling?