Teaching through tension: engaging refugee background students’ difficult knowledge through critical improvisation pedagogy

This study explores how educators in K-8 classrooms recognise, negotiate, and respond to the refugee background students’ experiences of war, displacement, and other forms of difficult knowledge. Refugee students arrive in schools with complex migration experiences that educators are often unprepared to receive and hold in classroom spaces. Drawing on 16 semi-structured interviews with Canadian classroom and ESL teachers who have experience supporting students with refugee backgrounds, this study highlights how teachers navigate classroom moments when students’ experiences of war, displacement, and migration surface as silence, multimodal expression, relationality, and refusal. Guided by Becker’s funds of difficult knowledge and Critical Refugee Studies, the findings demonstrate the tension educators face in protecting students from difficult knowledge while recognising refugee background students’ lived experiences as a meaningful source of knowledge for classroom learning. When teachers engaged in critical improvisation pedagogy, situated, relational, and ethically responsive practices, they challenged deficit perspectives and validated students’ difficult knowledge as an epistemic resource for classroom and language learning.