When Living History Knocks, Teaching Through Big Feelings
Photo Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals. Photos: US National Park Service employee, Yoichi Okamoto/Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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 1,300 words, an estimated 4½-minute read.
Trigger Warning: This week’s newsletter references death, including assassination, and other potentially sensitive events. Please care for yourself as needed.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
When the world enters the classroom, how do we teach through emotion, uncertainty, and change?
This month, we’re exploring what happens when living history enters the classroom.
Many teachers know this moment: a student blurts out a question or a charged comment after seeing something on the news.
And the lesson plan is dropped — at least for now. Because something too big, powerfully emotional, or perhaps incredibly personal has entered the room.
Sometimes it’s sudden and collective — like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the morning of September 11th. Other times, it’s local and intimate — a nearby school shooting, the loss of a classmate — tragic events that can reshape a community overnight.
In these moments, current events — or “living history” — don’t stay outside the school doors. They walk in, waiting to be noticed. Or they barge in, demanding to be seen.
And teachers, often the first adults students see after a tragedy, are silently asked to hold space for big emotions like grief, fear, anger, confusion — all while having to keep up with curricular plans penciled out months ago.
What’s a teacher’s responsibility in these moments? Is it to carry on as though the world hasn’t changed? Or is it to teach through history as it unfolds — and recognize that we, too, are living it?
Historical Snapshot: April 5, 1968
The morning after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, a third-grade teacher in Iowa named Jane Elliot put her standard lesson plans aside. Earlier that year, Elliot and her students had named Dr. King as their “Hero of the Month.” After Dr. King’s assassination, Elliot wanted to, as described by PBS Frontline, “show her pupils what discrimination feels like, and what it can do to people.”
Facing her students, all of whom were White, Elliot would embark on an impromptu exercise that rippled far beyond her Iowa town: the now-famous, highly-debated “Blue Eyes / Brown Eyes” exercise.
She divided her students by eye color, granting blue-eyed children more privileges on day one (e.g., longer recess, and first in line for lunch) and denying such access to brown-eyed students. Elliot also told the blue-eyed students they were “superior,” or smarter and more kind than their brown-eyed peers, reinforcing such language during reading activities. The next day, she switched, giving privileges to brown-eyed students, and taking them away from blue-eyed students.
In her third year of conducting this exercise, camera crews entered her classroom to record it. What began as an impromptu effort to help her students viscerally feel the impact of discrimination eventually grew into a decades-long conversation about race, pedagogy, and the boundaries and ethics of classroom practice.
By some, this lesson has been praised as visionary, by many it has been condemned as unethical.
Today, educators often question the lack of consent involved in this experiment, the potential for emotional harm, and whether such simulations are appropriate in schools.
But what’s clear is that Jane Elliot was grappling with living history, and trying to teach her students something that would change the way they saw the world.
While I would not recommend replicating this exercise today, it does voice the question: When living history enters the classroom, how can we address it?
If you’re feeling big emotions in response to Elliot’s approach, consider noting that.
What would you have done that morning? Would you have addressed the assassination? Would you have paused, pivoted, or stayed the regular course?
And perhaps most importantly: What kind of social-emotional space would you want to create for your students?
Holding Space In the Middle of History: Educators Responding to 9/11
In the days following September 11, 2001, teachers faced yet another clear example of living history entering the classroom.
Immediately following 9/11, some teachers inspired their students to write letters to first responders, an act that more than two decades later, "continues to bring comfort and hope” to others.
Decades later, teachers continue to discuss September 11th, in their classrooms. To learn more about current approaches, consider this news report, “How Teachers Are Keeping the Lessons of 9/11 Alive for a New Generation of Students.” And this article from Penn GSE that speaks to 9/11 and its continued impact, such as identity-based harm and Islamaphobia, “Teaching Beyond September 11.”
Whether it’s a national crisis or local tragedy that knocks on the classroom doors, what’s clear is that it will almost always come with “Big Feelings.”
How do you check in with yourself before stepping into a larger classroom discussion?
So, What Do We Do with Big Feelings?
Big feelings don’t have to derail learning. But they do beg to be acknowledged.
It's not a matter of if historical trauma, collective grief, or crisis will enter the classroom, it’s a matter of when.
And while we may not always have the words to solve or explain it, we can start by recognizing the weight of what’s arrived.
Let’s take a look at two steps we may take.
Step One: Ground Yourself First
One evidence-based approach comes from racial literacy expert Dr. Howard Stevenson, who developed a self-regulation strategy with the acronym CLCBE, or Calculate, Locate, Communicate, Breathe and Exhale.
Calculate: What’s happening within your body? Calculate how powerful it feels on a scale of one to ten.
Locate: Where is the emotion showing up in your body? Locate where it’s happening with specificity (e.g., shoulders, palms of hands, stomach).
Communicate: Speak it aloud or to yourself through internal acknowledgement or journaling (e.g., “I’m feeling anxious or scared right now”).
Breathe and Exhale: Regulate with deep breaths, centering yourself before engaging others. (Read here for breathing strategies).
Originally developed to help people process identity-based stress and racial trauma, CLCBE has become an applicable method for pausing, processing, and responding with intention. Remember, it’s difficult to lead others, until you yourself are grounded.
Step Two: Make Space for Students to Feel
Once you’re regulated, consider how you might hold space for your students. Here are some reflective prompts to guide your choices:
How can I invite students into conversation, rather than demand it?
How can I normalize emotional responses, or make space for “Big Feelings” — while also not assuming everyone is ready to share?
How can I remind my students that they are not alone — that others are likely experiencing a range of emotions too?
Do we have rituals of safety we can leverage? (Consider: Talking Circles and other restorative practices, journal prompts, quiet reflection corners, or mindful grounding exercises.)
Presence, permission, and patience will go a long way.
Why Start with Emotion First?
Without emotional regulation, deeper learning simply can’t happen.
Research across neuroscience and education shows that when we’re emotionally dysregulated — overwhelmed, fearful, or stressed — our brain prioritizes survival over learning.
This is often referred to as an "amygdala hijack," where the brain’s fear center overrides the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for executive function, reasoning, reflection — tasks connected to higher level learning.
Dr. Dan Siegel describes this through the lens of brain integration, or the idea that when students feel safe and are emotionally regulated, different regions of the brain can work together and function. (See his hand model of the brain to learn more about this clever learning tool.)
Put plainly: psychological safety is not a luxury in education, it's foundational.
When living history enters the classroom, students may not remember every curricular standard we covered, but they’ll likely remember how we made them feel.
Looking Ahead: Guardrails and Guidelines
Next week, we’ll explore what comes after the emotional check-in.
We’ll examine how we can create boundaries and norms for teaching in the middle of history — without unnecessarily replicating harm and erasing hard truths.
In the meantime, remember: living history rarely arrives with an exact script. But history can show us that care, curiosity, and intention can go a long way.
You don't need to have all the answers. We can begin with a willingness to pause, name what’s present, and go from there.