Difficult knowledge og folkedrab i historieundervisningen i et elevperspektiv

Abstract

In history class, students are confronted with the lives and living conditions of people throughout the centuries, including crimes against people that are contrary to the students’ ethics and morals, such as genocide. During a history class on these subjects, students may not know how to cope emotionally and cognitively with this kind of knowledge or how to refer to it. This raises the question of how students establish a cognitive readiness that can help them create meaning with what seems meaningless. This article aims to examine how students work with cognitive and emotional processes about genocide, which, in research, is called difficult knowledge and what I have called controversial knowledge. I argue that aspects of difficult knowledge can also be perceived as controversial because it provokes and is inappropriate in relation to norms from a contemporary perspective. The article is based on classroom observations from two case studies on the subject ‘genocide’ in lower secondary schools in Denmark (7^th to 9^th grade).