BY NICOLE MEHLMAN-DAVIDOW 

“I think the implications are even greater, particularly given our political climate, where lawmakers are trying to prohibit education about race and racism. Through my research, I found that the students and their caregivers are talking about the importance of learning about race, racism, anti-Blackness, so there's this real tension happening.”

What stood out most to Jones was that Black students and their caregivers’ emotions played a huge part in how the students perceived and interpreted historical events. “What my dissertation revealed was that the emotions the students felt from living in an anti-Black society really informed how they made sense of the past and the present.”

While Jones was studying at Michigan State, her advisor Anne-Lise Halvorsen, PhD, noticed her student’s dissertation was unique. It was Halvorsen who nominated Jones’ research for the AERA and NCSS awards. “The study wasn’t just innovative; it could have future implications that would impact education methods, pedagogy and policy broadly,” explained Jones. “It also was generational in nature, allowing for multiple perspectives to be amplified, which I think set my dissertation apart.”

Jones is looking to expand on her dissertation and begin to seek solutions towards different approaches to anti-racist education in social studies. As her work has gained notoriety at national conferences, her colleagues, peers and other researchers have taken notice.

Through AERA, Jones drew the attention of Cathryn van Kessel, PhD, and Kimberly Edmondson, PhD candidate, who were in the process of writing their book, “Teaching Villainification in Social Studies: Pedagogies to Deepen Understanding of Social Evils.” Jones wrote a chapter for the book, which was titled, “Removing the Binaries in History Curricula and Teacher Education: Difficult-ish as an Antidote to Villainification and Its Partner, ‘Difficult Histories’.”

Jones was inspired by one of her favorite TV shows when defining her research. “I was watching “Black-ish” one day, and I was like, ‘Oh, this will be a good title,’ and that's the backstory of how ‘difficult-ish’ came to be,” she said with a laugh.

As a doctoral student, Jones was interested in the idea of why social studies researchers were using adjectives like ‘difficult’ to describe history. “Difficult for whom is the question, and so I wanted to think more expansively about what we mean when we say difficult history,” explained Jones. “I conducted a smaller study with ten Black teachers, and I asked them, ‘Do you think these histories are difficult?’  They said no, which matters because when we denote something as difficult, it doesn’t necessarily capture everyone’s understanding.”

Jones’ book chapter problematizes the term difficult and challenges researchers and educators to think about the harms of labeling history. Difficult-ish is offered as a three-part framework. “The first part pushes researchers and educators to move beyond the binary that is created by the difficult label,” explained Jones.

Secondly, Jones explains that those defining what is difficult aren’t necessarily those who are directly affected by those histories: “The voices of those impacted by difficult histories are oftentimes decentered in curricular materials, so I wondered how we might begin teaching these histories in ways that center historically marginalized people and the people who experience the consequences of difficult histories in the present.”

The third part of difficult-ish brings readers to the idea that there is growth in moving forward. “We can acknowledge our discomfort with teaching difficult histories, but we can't sit there, so the third part of difficult-ish explores how we can move past discomfort and focus on how to effectively teach these histories,” said Jones.