The Routing and Re-Routing of Difficult Knowledge: Social Studies Teachers Encounter When the Levees Broke

Abstract

The author explores the articulations of six social studies student/teachers after a viewing of When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. The film, a documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the people in and around New Orleans, constitutes an encounter with what Deborah Britzman (1998) calls “difficult knowledge”—representations of social/historical trauma in pedagogical situations. Drawing on ideas from psychoanalytic theory, the author elaborates on the ways that this difficult knowledge (i.e., the viewing of injustice, suffering, and death) gets “routed” and “re-routed” through the participants' discussions about the film. The author's overall objective, then, is to explore the rich complexity of the ways that social and historical traumas are felt, experienced, understood and then made pedagogical. Because a great deal of social studies curriculum is, in fact, constituted by difficult knowledge (e.g., studying wars, famines, genocides, injustices, slavery), it is important to consider the ways that understandings, and lessons, are made from such interactions.