Walking the tightrope: exploring ‘risky’ issues and discomfort in the higher education classroom

Much recent public, political, and scholarly concern has centred on tensions between academic freedoms and effective pedagogies, student requirements and responsibilities for learning, and their rights as ‘consumers’. Working with uncomfortable issues and those of 'risk' is at the nexus of these possible competing narratives (Boler, 1999; Zembylas, 2015). Drawing on theoretical work on pedagogies of discomfort and critical dialogue with higher education youth work lecturers, we consider what counts as pedagogically discomforting in and beyond the classroom, and slippages between issues deemed as ‘the emotional’, ‘the sensitive’ and ‘the controversial’. A specific tension in preparing students for professional practice is that higher education pedagogues face a challenging dual duty of care, to students and practice settings, and the concurrent need to assess and prepare students to engage in sensitive arenas of practice. We ask how discomfort could be ethically handled within professional training contexts and what are the key institutional implications for enabling meaningful pedagogies of discomfort and challenge?