History Teachers Are Trauma Specialists
A vigil is held in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, France, for murdered school teacher
Samuel Paty. Photo by Thomas Dworzak/Magnum
Nena Močnik
Aeon
April 7, 2021
When the French middle-school teacher Samuel Paty was knifed to death by a teenager, who
was offended when he learned that Paty had showed cartoons of the prophet Muhammad as part
of his lesson in civic education, it hit me professionally and personally. Days after the event, I
found myself trying to navigate emotionally loaded conversations with friends who were raised
in the spirit of laïcité – the idea of a strict separation of religion and state – and almost dogmatic
belief in the ultimate power of freedom of expression, a symbolic and constitutional byproduct of
one of the most important events in French history.
At the same time, it was only with this event that I fully acknowledged that, since my arrival in
Paris last year, most of my new friends were predominantly of a Muslim background.
Considering the long and disturbing history of French intervention in North Africa and beyond,
and the long migration history between the two worlds, French Muslims are today as much a part
of French history as is the idea of human rights. Yet, a few days after the attack on Paty, with
France and the world divided and overwhelmed, I joined my friend Mohamed to test his new
bike. As he sped past me down avenue de l’Opéra, I found myself self-censoring to avoid calling
his name out loud.
In my private life, this event seemed divided between the pain of an attack on core French values
of the inviolability of the republic, on one side, and the intellectual pursuits of open
Islamophobia, masked in the right to freedom of speech, on the other. But, in my professional
life as a social justice educator and trauma researcher, the event exceeded even the scope of
French historical and sociopolitical space. This was a symbolic, yet extremely real, call to duty
that Europeans rarely want to accept: paying for centuries of symbolic, cultural, political and
physical murders worldwide. At the point of Paty’s murder, I was in the middle of the qualitative
research for my current project, which deals with the classroom transmission of collective
historical traumas in Europe, and our inability to seize this transmission as an opportunity to
prevent further identity-based violence. Several studies on mass atrocities, including slavery, the
Holocaust and the Srebrenica genocide, have by now proven the correlation between historical
trauma and contemporary identity-based violence (such as racism, antisemitism and
Islamophobia).
As part of my research, I have been conducting interviews with university professors and
lecturers who teach in history departments in countries across Europe. After the murder of Paty,
the conversation remains charged: I am encountering more pessimism, sadness and hopelessness,
and professors express greater concern over the potential risks of exposing the troubling content
of European history. Much more than before, history teachers see the potential for Paty’s
experience to be repeated in their own classrooms.
My interviews have been illuminating. Professors from the Netherlands and Germany mentioned
specific instances of history teachers in their respective countries being threatened and forced
into hiding. A professor from Estonia mentioned the risk he encountered when, after explaining
the consequences of Stalinism in the post-Soviet world, a Georgian student became visibly upset.
A professor from Sweden ran into Holocaust denial from students with Arab backgrounds.
Professors from Austria and the United Kingdom, both white males, expressed the challenge of
discussing slavery in their multicultural classrooms comprising mostly students of colour. A few
of the interviewed professors even mentioned students’ disclosures of sexual assault after lessons
covering mass rapes that occurred during conflicts in imperial history.
Europe’s past and present are bloody. Collective traumas are transmitted not just in our families,
but brought into multicultural classrooms, spaces filled with historical pain. The collective
trauma of our students should, of course, be part of history education. Yet most teachers today
are unprepared to critically approach – let alone heal – this pain.
None of the professors interviewed for my study had ever obtained institutional guidance on how
past collective traumas can be triggered by current inequalities, nor professional training for
responding to potential triggers when exposing students to traumatic historical sources. Did Paty
have this training? When he tried to lower the temperature by inviting any students who thought
that they might be offended by the cartoons to briefly leave the classroom or close their eyes,
how was this awkward, obviously disastrous decision informed?
As a university professor, you rarely get institutional guidance in crucial skills important for
today’s teaching, such as multicultural sensitivity, emotional intelligence, and mediating skills to
navigate disagreement and promote empathy and respect. The professors that I interviewed
expressed the need for more guidance and support before exposing students to potentially
traumatic material, and have themselves struggled to work on this within their classrooms. They
mentioned, as an obstacle, the rigid European system of teaching practices that still favour what
the philosopher of education Paulo Freire called the ‘banking model’ of education, namely, the
idea that knowledge is ‘deposited’ into students’ heads through the receiving and memorising of
facts; this is opposed to practices that encourage questioning and adopting a critical approach to
the information provided by educators. In addition, the overpacked curricula and limited time
frame don’t allow for much personal connection with the students: a professor from France
mentioned her frustration at having only two lessons in the entire course dedicated to the two
world wars. Within such a time frame, it’s unrealistic to offer not only space, but also a safe
space, to address the plural identities of our students that are built on the intersections of
individual, family and collective traumas.
Several of the professors that I interviewed remained extremely hesitant to pathologise narratives
of difficult pasts, even as the trauma industry has exploded, particularly with the rise of memory
studies in Europe. Some refused to participate in my research, even though they were teaching
courses on colonialism, state repression, migration, civil wars or the histories of the 20th century.
They told me, flat-out, that they wouldn’t deal with trauma; if I hoped to do so, I should contact
the social work or psychology departments.
Such a response is based on the current, clinically oriented understanding of trauma. This
explains, in part, why educators don’t recognise the potential connection between some of the
historical material in their curricula and students’ struggles; it explains the lack of traumasymptom recognition. A traumatised individual can experience negative emotions such as
flashbacks, anxiety, depression, feeling emotionally numb, but can also turn toward aggressive
and violent communication – less recognised indicators of trauma. Anger that leads someone to
behead an unknown person might result from years or generations of stored frustrations,
marginalised identities, collective losses, exclusion, and inability to grieve.
Despite all this, a Swedish professor that I interviewed believed that, by the time young adults
reach the university level, they have already learned enough about the traumatic past within the
primary- and secondary-school curricula to comprehend this trauma without any negative
emotional impact. Similarly, a professor from Spain emphasised that, by having freely chosen to
study history as a university subject, students are assumed to be mature enough to accept
responsibility for their emotional reaction to archival sources, oral histories and visual
testimonies full of disturbing graphic imagery and descriptions.
As it turns out, the biggest problem isn’t the emotional readiness of university history students.
The problem arises later, when many of these students become employed in public service
organisations, among which are primary and secondary schools, civil and nongovernmental
organisations in the informal education sector, and museums. These individuals become frontline
workers who don’t have the privilege of teaching only handpicked, mature learners. In addition
to communicating factual knowledge, they have to navigate between preserving the role of
history in conjunction with collective national identities and raising children in the spirit of
active civic education.
Teaching history in European public schools today means working in a context where the
victories of our big nations, as taught in the state-governed curricula, are nothing but collective
and family traumas for so many of our pupils who have actively lived through the persistent
existence of structural violence – exclusion, othering and discrimination. To prepare these
teachers to operate in such complex and emotionally demanding environments, we need to
provide them with the skills and knowledge that will serve to break the cycles of history-based
inequalities and oppressions – this is exactly why the study of history must include sensitivity to
the traumas of students, experienced either firsthand or transmitted across generations.
Paty and his murderer, Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, aren’t representatives of the two
sides of one of the most striking social divisions in France. They’re a call for Europe to
acknowledge the pain inflicted on generations of communities around the world. What we need
is a deeper and more systematic understanding of what sustains this pain. What we need is to
understand that contemporary history teaching isn’t dealing only with historical facts and
sources. It’s a display of how far we’ve come with progressive European ideas, liberties,
freedoms and human rights – the values that so many Europeans, including myself, identify with
and wouldn’t want to negotiate. But it’s also a display that this modern, progressive Europe was
built on continuous practices of violence, oppression and sustained inequality.
The beauty of education is that it has the power to transform pain into healing and exclusion into
inclusion. Freedom of expression in today’s Europe means nothing unless it applies to all of us.
The same is true with learning and teaching history: it means nothing if it doesn’t include
discussion of and sensitivity to pain that we don’t consider our own.
Nena Močnikis a guest scholar at CY Cergy Paris Université and the leader of the European Commissionfunded project Again Never Again. She is the author of the monographs Trauma Transmission and
Sexual Violence: Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Postconflict Settings (2020) and Sexuality after War
Rape: From Narrative to Embodied Research (2019), and the co-editor of the forthcoming volume
Engaging with Historical Traumas: Experiential Learning and Pedagogies of Resilience (2021). She lives in
Paris.