Learning to Disagree

Teachers in the twenty-first century are frequently confronted by the issue of how to react to extreme opinions or false information ingested by their pupils from social networks, for example, and brought to the classroom.

  • Project Goals

    The aim of the project was to help teachers in Europe deal with controversial or sensitive topics in history and politics lessons.


  • Approach

    Multi-perspective teaching materials on historical and political topics relevant throughout Europe were developed on the basis of a needs analysis, as were teacher handouts on discussion formats and assessment criteria. The project has also published policy recommendations for dealing with controversial topics.

    The project has been conducted jointly with our partners Euroclio (the Netherlands), the Mount School in York (Great Britain), Edukacija za 21. vek (Serbia) and the Maynooth University (Ireland). The Leibniz Institute for Educational Media used focus groups and a questionnaire to investigate the experiences, teaching practices and requirements of teachers in 30 European countries with relation to their approaches to controversial subjects. The results constitute a requirements analysis, which provides the foundation for materials and training courses.


  • Results

    Based on the understanding that the situative context should always be taken into consideration when addressing controversial or sensitive topics in the classroom and it is therefore not possible to present general solutions, teacher experiences were evaluated and a number of strategies identified. Many teachers supported discipline-based approaches that emphasise rational argumentation, whereas others pointed to the need to reach students on an emotional level as well. The project came to two conclusions, which acknowledged that meaningful classroom discussions rely on the exchange of rational arguments, but also rely to some degree on emotionally motivated engagement: On one hand the need for careful preparation was highlighted, which could allow sensitive and controversial topics to be discussed rationally; on the other hand, if emotional reactions are to be expected from students, this should be taken into account in the planning, for example by selecting strategies that promote empathy.


  • Publications
    • Tribukait, Maren und Steven Stegers (2022). 'Historiana. An online resource desigend to promote multi-perspective and transnational history teaching'. Mario Carretero, María Cantabrana und Cristian Parellada (eds). History Education in the Digital Age. Cham: Springer, 65-88, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10743-6_4. 
    • Tribukait, Maren (2021). 'Students’ prejudice as a teaching challenge: How European history educators deal with controversial and sensitive issues in a climate of political polarization'. Theory & Research in Social Education. DOI: 10.1080/00933104.2021.1947426.
    • Christophe, Barbara und Maren Tribukait (2021). Learning to disagree: policy recommendations. GEI Policy Brief 1/2021. Available online.
    • Christophe, Barbara und Maren Tribukait (2019). Learning to disagree: needs assessment. Eckert.Dossier 5 (2019). urn:nbn:de:0220-2019-0066. https://repository.gei.de/handle/11428/305 

Project Team

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