Teaching what hurts: Socioeconomic inequalities as difficult knowledge in the narratives of three Chilean history teachers under neoliberalism

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This study examines how socioeconomic inequality emerges as difficult knowledge in the narratives of three Chilean history teachers. Based on two years of fieldwork combining narrative conversations, walking interviews, and a collective mapping workshop, we analyze how teachers describe pedagogical encounters in which inequality is taught, questioned, and experienced under neoliberalism. Our analysis identifies three key findings. First, difficult knowledge emerges when teachers’ lived experiences of socioeconomic inequality become entangled with the curriculum they are required to teach. Second, pedagogical encounters become affectively challenging, marked by discomfort and rage, particularly when teachers interpret student responses as defending or minimizing structural inequality. Third, these encounters are experienced bodily, including physical exhaustion and visible changes in voice, posture, and expression. By showing how socioeconomic inequality emerges as difficult knowledge through everyday pedagogical encounters, this study contributes to scholarship on difficult knowledge in social studies education and offers insights for teacher education attentive to its affective and embodied dimensions.