Leading on teaching difficult and/or sensitive topics in higher education, 25 June 2024 (in person)

Tuesday 25th June 2024, 13:00 - 16:00 (in person)

About this session

This session will be delivered by the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) team academic lead, Helen Knowler, and invited colleagues with experience in this area. It will take place in person on the Bloomsbury Campus.

We will use a theoretical framework, informed by the scholarship of Britzman (1998, 2000), Rothberg (2019), Sriprakash (2022), Love (2019) and Zembylas (2017) to explore the use practical strategies ensuring that difficult and/or sensitive topics are taught appropriately, critically, and carefully. 

Using UCL’s historic links to and legacy of eugenics as an example of a difficult and/or sensitive topic, we will explore the challenges and opportunities of working developing your expertise in this area. We will work with experts from UCL who will share examples from their own practice to consider the theoretical, ethical, and practical issues of incorporating difficult and/or sensitive topics.  

Engaging in session activities and discussions will help you develop your confidence, prepare for challenges, and support your ability to develop creative responses to teaching difficult and/or sensitive topics that will develop your own inclusive practice and support student engagement.    

Feedback from a participant in March 2024,

"Getting a couple of different presenters was excellent - gave a lot more to discuss, and meant the lessons were more widely applicable across disciplines."

Learning objectives

In the session we aim to support you to:

• Choose appropriate strategies and approaches for teaching difficult and/or sensitive topics in your discipline and justify their use educationally. 
• Reflect upon the affordance and limitations of differing approaches and relate this to student experiences in your own disciplinary context. 
• Evaluate the strategies for supporting colleagues to teach difficult and/or sensitive topics across your module(s)/programme(s).  

Outcomes

By the end of the session, we encourage you to reflect upon:

• Your confidence in selecting appropriate teaching and learning approaches planning to and working with difficult or sensitive topics in your context.  
• Your knowledge and understanding of the development, implementation and evaluation of appropriate teaching and learning approaches when including difficult and/or sensitive topics in the modules and/or programmes you lead. 
• Your ability to justify the use of difficult topics and link this to student experience (for example, success, belonging, and/or employability). 
• Your understanding of strategies to support colleagues who want to work with difficult and/or sensitive topics in your department/faculty. 

Preparation

This session assumes some experience and knowledge of teaching difficult and/or sensitive topics. You might be looking for fresh inspiration for something you have taught for a long time, or you could be introducing a new topic into your existing module/programme offering. You may have already attended our shorter online sessions (Teaching difficult and/or sensitive topics: Three starting points and Preparing to teach difficult and/or sensitive topics in higher education: Theory into practice). 

You will be aware of educational theories that inform your teaching and understand the importance of integrating theories of teaching and learning with your educational practice. You might have some expertise (either professionally or personally) around inclusion and social justice, and you will be open to discussing and debating issues related to the relational and affective dimensions of teaching and learning. You will be aware of the importance of research-based approaches to professional learning and development in higher education. You may have already attended our taster and online sessions and want to continue to develop your expertise in this area. 

We also recommend that you look at the Arena Inclusive Language Toolkit before you attend this course. 

Further Reading

Please share the Arena Inclusive Language Toolkit with your colleagues where possible and think about this toolkit can support their practice when teaching difficult and/or sensitive topics. 

Britzman, D. P. (1998). “That lonely discovery”: Anne Frank, Anna Freud, and the question of pedagogy. Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.  

Britzman, D. P. (2000b). If the story cannot end: Deferred action, ambivalence, and difficult knowledge. In R. I. Simon, C. Eppert, & S. Rosenberg (Eds.), Between hope and despair: Pedagogy and the remembrance of historical trauma (pp. 27–58). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.  

Love, B. (2019) We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston. Beacon Press.  

Rothberg, M. (2019) The implicated subject: beyond victims and perpetrators. Stanford. Stanford University Press.  

Zembylas, M. (2022) Ethics, politics and affects: renewing the conceptual and pedagogical framework of addressing fanaticism in education. Ethics and Education 17:3, pages 261-276.