2025 Theses Doctoral

Sentipensando the Violent Pasts of Guatemala: Pluriversal Examinations of Teacher Learning through Historical Inquiry

Haynes, Charlotte

History and social studies teachers are often shouldered with the daunting task of teaching polarizing, contested histories in communities still grappling with the legacies of fear, persecution, and violence—without the knowledge, skills, or community support needed to transform learning about the past into a path for teaching about violence, colonialism, and conflict. In Guatemala, where public discourse remains constrained and legal reckoning with past atrocities is limited, educators are affectively entangled with charged, fragmented memories inherited from family and community.

This dissertation investigated the frameworks, experiences, memories, and discourses that inform processes of teacher learning about Guatemala’s 36-year Internal Armed Conflict. Walking alongside educators through a professional development program, I examined the pedagogical openings and foreclosures of weaving disciplinary historical inquiry with pluriversal encounters with violent, controversial, and often conflicting memories.

I argue that the task of preparing to teach about violent histories demands educators loosen the fearsome grip of silence around the past, peel back layers of distrust, and confront a culture of fear grounded in practices of survival and resistance. Moreover, it entails that educators enact a sentipensante, felt-thinking examination of the intersections, contradictions, and affective repercussions of conflicting accounts of the past that interrogates who carries responsibility for the violence and atrocities and who and/or what can be trusted.