Engaging with teachers’ difficult knowledge, seeking moral repair: the entanglement of moral and peace education

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe paper explores how might teacher educators engage with teachers’ difficult knowledge and negotiate competing moral truths, when this effort obviously fails to provide adequate ‘answers’ or ‘solutions’. Although the paper is theoretical, this question’s point of departure is an incident from a series of teacher workshops in Cyprus. The question is explored from the vantage of two thinkers, Deborah Britzman and Margaret Walker, who, in different ways, theorize the moral challenges of engaging with difficult knowledge in ways that disrupt stereotypical categories of victims and perpetrators. It is argued that drawing on Britzman and Walker offers a pedagogical theory in peace and moral education that is less about offering definitive answers and settling the questions of moral wrongdoing and more about ‘staying with the trouble’, that is, staying with difficulty for regenerating thinking around issues of morality and peace education. The paper concludes by suggesting under what conditions peace education may function as transformative moral education.