Guidelines and Guardrails for Teaching Challenging History
Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: When the Outside World Enters the Classroom, Teaching in the Middle of History
This week’s focus: Historical Literacy, or helpful frameworks to expand how we approach history and identity.
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1,400 words, an estimated 5-minute read.
Trigger Warning: This week’s newsletter references violence including slavery and genocide, and other potentially sensitive events. Please care for yourself as needed.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
This month, we’re exploring what happens when living history enters the classroom — those moments when current events are immediate, emotional, and too important to ignore.
Last week, we looked at what it means to pause and hold space when the world barges in — often in the form of a news headline, a tragic event, or a student’s emotionally charged question.
Using examples like teaching in the wake of 9/11 and the assassination of Dr. King, we focused on the first step: making space for Big Feelings.
This week, we turn to the second step: creating guidelines and guardrails.
Our goal is not to shut down conversations, but to guide them with clarity, care, and responsibility.
When teaching traumatic or politically changed history, structure isn’t a constraint — it’s a safeguard.
Language as a Guardrail, Rethinking Harmful Words
Difficult moments are inevitable in the classroom — especially when language intersects identity. One of the most persistent and underreported issues? The use of racial epithets.
As a consultant, I’ve found that the use of racial epithets is often the most urgent concern raised by school leaders when speaking about identity-based harm. Though, it’s usually something shared behind closed doors.
Not only are racial epithets common in school yards, they’re also used in classrooms — in literature, in historical documents, and at times, even spoken by faculty who are teaching such material.
Commonly read novels, such as Of Mice and Men, and historical documents include racial epithets and slurs. To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, uses the n-word 48 times. I’m not suggesting book bans, but I am advocating for a clear, thoughtful, humanizing approach — that harmful language is not spoken or read aloud, that students understand the origins and impact of such terms, and that we do not retraumatize students by repeating slurs, whether recklessly or casually.
School communities can benefit by proactively agreeing to a common set of goals and guidelines around language. For example, many schools have adopted a “No Slur” policy, a simple but powerful commitment to reject dehumanizing language inside and outside the classroom.
Even in elementary spaces, students can begin to understand shared agreements around care and dignity. In a previous Humanizing History newsletter, we shared how even a “minimum expectation of tolerance” can be a powerful tool for shaping classroom culture. (See here to read more, and download our free classroom poster.)
Guidelines and guardrails can provide an effective, mission-aligned framework to create bridges and safer access points for learning.
When Reenactments Cross the Line
Teaching “challenging” topics — especially those rooted in trauma and systemic harm — demands thoughtful boundaries. One commonly misused tool? Reenactments.
While simulations can be effective in some learning contexts, they’re not appropriate for events rooted in dehumanization — such as slavery, genocide, and forced displacement.
And yet, they persist.
I’ve personally heard from numerous educators about simulations at their schools, such as reenactments of the Middle Passage, where students were instructed to lay tightly packed on classroom floors, or simulations where children were “chased through the woods,” pretending to escape slavery.
Some reenactments have made the news. In 2021, a school in Washington, D.C., was reported to ask third graders to reenact the Holocaust, including mimicking grave diggings and executions. In 2019, a “mock auction” for enslaved people was reported at a New York school. In 2023, a school in Wisconsin was reported to have engaged in an insensitive slavery reenactment.
These activities are not only pedagogically unsound, they’re often deeply traumatizing, especially for students who share the identities of those who were historically, and likely currently, harmed.
A clear guardrail is needed.
History professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries echoes this sentiment: "[Reenactments] can reinforce stereotypes rather than disrupting them. And especially when you begin to isolate children of color in these scenarios, it can really create a traumatic experience… What are you doing to repair the damage after that?”
Jeffries recommends a more inquiry-based approach: “You don’t say, hey, what would you do if you were this person? You say, what did this person do? And what were some of their options?”
In other words, don’t cast students in roles they didn’t ask for. Instead, invite them to explore decisions people made across time and place, varied experiences, and survival with empathy and critical thinking — not performance.
Toward Truth and Full Personhood
Another essential guardrail: avoid distortions and oversimplifications.
In the United States, for example, the “Lost Cause” myth — still present in some textbooks and curricula — portrays slavery as a benign, even benevolent institution, and downplays the role slavery had as a primary cause of the Civil War.
These myths obscure both violence and resistance, and reinforce white supremacist ideas under the guise of historical neutrality.
Instead of softening the truth, we can deepen it — by emphasizing nuanced stories of survival, agency, and full humanity.
Consider Harriet Tubman — perhaps one of the most-well known names from the history of slavery, and a name that has unfortunately been flattened into a single story.
Tubman, as Humanizing History wrote about here, was also a scientist, a military strategist, a botanist, a healer, and an expert in celestial navigation. Her survival, and leadership, required intelligence, skill, resilience.
Using humanizing language also matters. Terms like "enslaved person” instead of “slave,” or “freedom seeker” as opposed to “fugitive,” help reclaim dignity and shift how students understand history and humanity at large.
Global Models We Can Leverage
Across the world, there are examples to teach “challenging history” with care and integrity.
Germany mandates Holocaust education in public schools, and while implementation varies across its 16 federal states, the commitment to remembrance and civic reflection is clear. For guidelines, consider this resource developed by the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission provides a national framework for reckoning with Indigenous genocide and cultural erasure — centering truth-telling, healing, and Indigenous voices.
Learning for Justice’s Teaching Hard History framework offers K-12 tools for teaching about slavery in the U.S. with depth and empathy.
Washington D.C.’s Social Studies State Standards, which I helped co-develop, were the first in the U.S. to explicitly embed an antiracist lens across Grades K-12.
Reflection Questions and Strategies
We don’t want to replicate the harm we’re trying to address. Our teaching can reflect care, respect, and critical reflection — approaches that aim to expand how we see ourselves and others.
Before Designing the Lesson
Reflect. Consider asking yourself:
What is my goal? What values guide my teaching?
What impact do I want this lesson to have?
Am I highlighting complexity, truth, and full personhood?
What language am I using, and how does it shape student perception?
Could my approach unintentionally reinforce harm?
How am I centering identity as something to be affirmed and safeguarded?
When teaching history rooted in trauma, how we teach matters as much as what we teach.
Strategies to Foster Care and Understanding
Here are a few practical strategies to create more respectful learning environments:
Co-create norms. Develop classroom agreements for how to engage with emotional or identity-based topics, such as: listening with respect, making “I” statements, considering intent and naming impact of statements, instituting a “no slur” policy, etc.
Context before dialogue. Before students debate or discuss historical events, frame the full context, such as emphasizing the role of systemic racism and other forms of dehumanization and harm.
Prepare language for real-time moments. Plan how you’ll respond when microaggressions or identity-based harm occurs. Statements such as: “Let’s pause. That comment doesn’t align with our guidelines,” or “That sounds like a harmful stereotype. In this classroom, we…” can interrupt a harmful moment, which is the first crucial step. Meeting harmful moments with silence can feel like permission; so, having a phrase to interrupt identity-based harm is important.
Choose inquiry over reenactment. Ask students to analyze decisions made by historical figures, rather than inserting themselves into traumatic roles.
Affirm and safeguard identity. Center identity as something to be safeguarded, not exposed. Acknowledge pain, don’t reproduce it. Highlight resilience, dignity, agency, skills, empowerment. When having access to human voice, such as primary sources, leverage it.
Next week, we’ll explore what it means to develop identity-based literacy — and highlight pedagogical examples and educators who do such work with intention.
In the meantime, remember, guidelines and guardrails aren’t barriers, they’re bridges toward deeper care, connection, and successful long-term learning.