With a world literally and figuratively burning around them, high school social studies teachers are charged with engaging students in sensitive topics.

Social studies curricula today, for example, is concerned with themes like residential schools and racism. It’s also important to understand that beyond following explicit pre-set curricula, student-centred education calls for teachers to attend to students’ experiences in the social world.

This means making space for students’ observations or questions about current events like the ICE raids in Minnesota and inquiring into how unfolding events fit into larger social and historical patterns or themes. These conversations are a legitimate and everyday part of many social studies classrooms.

Social studies education demands sustained engagement with difficult knowledge and a heightened sense of obligation to both students and society, even as neoliberal and neoconservative pressures call for a stance of neutrality, which is neither possible nor desirable.

While teaching is widely recognized as stressful and teachers struggle with burnout, the relationship between that stress and specific subject curriculum is under-explored.

Social studies teachers are often required to dwell in the dark places of what Deborah Britzman, who researches the history of psychoanalysis and education, calls difficult knowledge. This pertains to traumatic histories that expose human vulnerability or violence — knowledge that is too much to bear or “make sense” of.

While teacher stress, burnout and demoralization are well-studied, the weight I’m thinking about in my doctoral research and as a social studies teacher comes from social studies’ teachers’ sense of obligation to their students in this moment, to their discipline and to democracy — and the way carrying this weight exacts an emotional toll.

In this way, teaching social studies differs from other subjects.........

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