A Discomforting Pedagogy of Poverty: Discourses, Representations and Vulnerabilities

Discomfort is pedagogically significant in encouraging learners to step out of their comfort zone to explore how systems of meaning are implicated in the stigmatising processes of those who experience poverty. In this paper, we propose a discomforting pedagogy of poverty and outline a set of interrelated tools for teachers and learners to interpret these processes with the aim of unsettling normalised views of poverty in the classroom. We offer a practice-based reflection of using this pedagogic approach, which asks students to contemplate individually and collectively how they are entangled in discourses, representations and shared vulnerabilities. By scaffolding discomfort in a supportive environment, we contend that a deeper engagement with the structural realities of poverty offers an alternative learning pathway to make sense of poverty as difficult sociological knowledge.